Letters to the Editor
Time flies -- even in church!
June 12, 2005: I totally agree with your article about
one's
perception of time that seems to accelerate as one gets older. I've
just
completed a five year parish assignment and have now been reassigned to
a new
one. It seems like I just got here and now it's over. If there are any
other
articles or commentaries that you have on this phenomenon, let me know.
Thanks
for the great insights.
Fr. Greg Jozefiak
[Thanks for writing, Father
Greg. I'm
sure you've read James Kenney's piece on logtime, which is much better
than
mine... If not, take
a look! ... ed.]
The years, they are a-shrinkin'
September 2, 2001: In his letter of May 3, 1998, ("Fractured
fractions - or, the incredible shrinking years"), Jeffrey Steinberg was
probably on the right track in explaining why the years seem to grow
shorter as
we get older. That our brain compares a time period with our age is an
explanation that goes back at least to the 19th century. This
comparison
results in a logarithmic relationship between the subjective time we
perceive
and the objective time of the calendar, with interesting consequences,
as
developed on my web page
(http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/jmkenney/).
James M. Kenney USA
[This is why I keep the old
columns
on-line -- who'da thunk I'd still be hearing about lousy ol' column #11
in
2001? Mr. Kenney correctly observes that Jeff Steinberg is a sharp guy
-- comes
from having been born the same day as yours truly... ed.]
Fractured fractions -- or, the incredible shrinking years
May 3, 1998: Where the heck does Urbie come
from? You made
an interesting comment about why years go buy so quickly ("How'd I get
here?," April 28). Here is my reasoning: With each passing
year, a year is a relatively smaller portion of your total lifetime, so
it goes by shorter. When I was 4, 1 year was 1/4.5 (average
of 1/4
and 1/5) of my life, but when I turned 35 on 4/29/98, the last year was
only
1/34.5 of my life.
Jeffrey
"Ein" Steinberg
Wormtown, USA
Don't let your mother see you out there with no helmet!
May 21, 2005: Motorcyclist deaths don't cost society
anything
because most of the dead body's vital organs are usually still in good
shape...
transplants anyone?
"rafghan"
rahmadullah@yahoo.com
[I'm assuming this letter is in response to Motorcycle
Issues 101, 7/21/98. When I wrote that piece, I hadn't
considered the
value of donated organs, but the writer does make an excellent case
against the
"social cost" argument usually used to justify helmet laws. I have a
feeling he and I are probably not on the same page about the virtues of
motorcycling in general, but it's nice to know that some members of the
public
recognize the speciousness of the theory that motorcyclists are somehow
costing
society huge amounts of money by not wearing helmets. I would argue we
could
save society a lot of money, and prevent a lot of highway carnage, by
banning
cell-phone use while driving. We might also require special licenses
and testing
for SUV drivers and make killing someone with your motor vehicle a
criminal
offense. Those measures would save many more traffic deaths than
requiring
motorcyclists to wear helmets -- leaving aside the question of whether
or not
it's a good idea to wear one, which I think it is. And in any case, if
we want
to be consistent, we should also require car drivers to wear helmets --
makes
sense in racing; why not on the street? ... ed.]
New Music: Can it sound good?
April
9, 2007: I know it's been
six years since you asked, but I see a letter from January of this
year, so... The easiest (and truest) answer to "Why does modern
music sound so bad?" is simply this: "But it doesn't." Too easy? Well,
name a few pieces that sound bad to you. Forget about all the theories.
Forget about audiences dwindling. Forget about hegemony. Forget about
Mr. Pleasants' agony. Name some things that you think sound bad. What's
bad about them? Now, forget about one more thing, people who agree with
you. What about the people who find these pieces beautiful, who are
exhilarated and enriched by them, who truly don't go to symphony
concerts any more because the music they love is never played there? So
what if thousands of concert-goers agree with you? A thousand blind
people doesn't prove there's no light. I can only offer you my own
experience. Most of what Pleasants' attacks in his book is music I find
very pleasant and satisfying. More, I find music that's been written
since then even more satisfying and pleasant. And I don't mean people
like Erb (whom I quite like, too, by the way). I do mean people like
Feldman, though, and Lachenmann and Dumitrescu and Akita (aka Merzbow).
If you can never like what I like, so be it. But why keep attacking
what I so obviously enjoy, what I so obviously value? Let's say you
don't like dark beer; it tastes harsh and bitter. You only like Miller
Lite. Fine. Drink up. But please leave off criticizing Stouts and
Porters, arguing that no one really likes them, that for every six pack
of Guiness sold, there are a thousand 24 packs of Miller Lite sold, as
if popularity proved anything.
Michael Karman
[Thanks for writing
-- at least you're not in as bad a mood as Barry! If you like
contemporary music, more power to you -- and as I think I pointed out
in the column, there's a lot of contemporary music I like, too.
Namely, the stuff that sounds good -- expresses something, has some
richness of sound, inventiveness, and -- not least -- some technical
skill. The stuff that my wife, the art major, describes as "cats
in heat," however, I can do without. New music I like?
Edgar Meyer, for one. Mark O'Connor, for another. These
guys aren't academic noisemaker-snobs, nor are they minimalist
repetitive-chord specialists -- but neither do they draw attention to
any particular style they're writing in. Which is the whole point
-- back in the day, good music was all about expressing and
communicating, not about shocking and being different for its own sake
(which, of course, is itself about 80 years out of date, at this point).
In any case, thanks for reading, and for
writing! ...ed.]
January
14, 2007: Dear Music Hater: I
think it is
now clear that Henry Pleasants wrote this book as a cover for his spy
activities. It was a very clever diversion. Pleasants had no ear and no
sense
of what art is all about: the activities that go on all the time to
change
people's way of seeing, hearing, feeling when something new comes
along.
Pleasants had no sense of the new, and he was only interested in easy
listening, background music, as you can see from his writings on opera
and
jazz. He finally realized that his paltry ideas were overwhelmed when
in 1988
in an English pub he said to his buddy John Rockwell, "John, we
lost," meaning that the "tenacity" and the determination of men
and women with superb ears and open minds were writing contemporary
music
without stop. And contemporary music has gone through all sorts of
styles, from
using the piano's insides (producing some of the most beautiful effects
imaginable), the voice's ability to sound musical phonemes, to
electronics.
Sure, some of it is bad; that's the way with all art and with history.
George
W. Bush is the lousiest US president in history and we once harbored
slavery,
but that doesn't make all our presidents bad and US history completely
shameful. It's the same with painting, music, literature and theater.
BLC
The
New Music Connoisseur
[First
of all, I am well aware that Henry Pleasants worked for the CIA – this
was explained in the article by Gene Lees that served as my
introduction to
Pleasants and his controversial views on new music.
Why do his detractors insist that his day gig as a spy
negates the merits of his music criticism? Probably
because they can’t stand the fact that – as
concertgoers demonstrate every day, voting with their ticket dollars –
he
was right. The quotation you give,
that “we lost,” is not news, either – Lees mentions it in his article
as
well. What he meant was not that
new music had gotten good all of a sudden – quite the contrary; that
contemporary composers, by and large, had stuck to their guns, empty
seats be
damned.
As
for contemporary composers having produced “some of the most beautiful
effects
imaginable,” I’ll give you that.
But you’re proving my point.
Most new music is just that – effects. A
small percentage of good modern composers have grown up,
gone past mere effects and shock value, and have written music that
sounds good
and communicates a lot. Leslie Bassett, who I note is one of your
contributors,
is a good example. There are
certainly many good composers alive today – nowhere do I say otherwise
(Pleasants does, but my column does not). Others, like the recently
departed
Daniel Pinkham, leave an ample legacy demonstrating that good music has
not
entirely gone out of fashion. They
also demonstrate that modern music does not have to sound bad.
I’ll
stick with Leonard Bernstein’s response to Pleasants’s book. I don’t have the exact quote offhand,
but he said something to the effect that “Pleasants says what the rest
of us
are thinking.” … ed.]
September 16, 2005: Even a cursory appraisal of pop culture
supports the
assertion that prevailing tastes change over time; our own generation
no longer
listens with as much aplomb to the music of Palestrina, for example.
How does
this change come about if not through the gradual acceptance of
elements
initially at such variance to popular taste? Pleasants's argument seems
implicitly to favor the notion of Platonic Form to which the principles
of
classical harmony adhere more closely than modern practice. And yet, if
there
exists such a celestial beast as Music, wouldn't the constant shifting
preclude
popular taste from being its representative, or at the very least point
up to a
much broader paradigm?
I am a dedicated champion of
serial music,
and in the end I find no rational argument for personal preference. In
discussing matters of this kind we must at last come to that shadowy
impasse
where reason breaks down...there being fewer things more spurious or
tiresome
than blind faith in the ability of logic to vaunt or decry whatever it
finds
there.
Michael (no last name given)
[I think I see what you're
saying, with
regards to "gradual acceptance of elements initially at such variance
to
popular taste." But Pleasants goes to great lengths to debunk the myth
that great music has always been unpopular in its own time as well as
Slonimsky's
specious 40-year time lag between a piece's appearance and its
acceptance by
the listening public. History speaks for itself -- great music has not always been unpopular in its own time.
... ed.]
March 15, 2005: As publisher of a magazine I started with
my own money,
I have no axe to grind. I decided on the subject of "New Music"
because it was one that nobody else (or maybe a tiny population) cared
much
about. And in those 13 years now I have spent lots of copy chastising
the halls
of academe for fostering an artform that mostly offended people and
certainly
kept them from coming into the concert hall until the "damn thing was
over." (They used the same phrase for Beethoven's 'Eroica' Symphony,
didn't they?) But on occasion I will still rave about the really great,
highly
listenable works of the last 50 years that were not driven by the
universities
or tightly wound musical organizations, works like George Crumb's
'Makrokosmos'
and 'Ancient Voices of Children,' or Milton Babbitt's 'Phonemena,' or
Leslie
Bassett's 'Echoes from an Invisible World,' or John Adams's 'Nixon in
China'
and 'Harmonielehre' or Gunther Schuller's 'Paul Klee Studies' or --
well, I
could go on and on without even mentioning some of the great choral and
operatic works since 1950 nor the works of European composers. Yes,
there are
differences between today and yesteryear, not exactly a brilliant
conclusion.
But one of the most conspicuous differences went unmentioned in your
piece: the
availability of the phonograph record. Why does it matter? Because we
hear more
junk on that medium than any society ought to bear. Plenty of it -
believe me -
is of the so-called popular variety. They didn't have the LP or the CD
in 1800.
So a musical event was really AN EVENT!
I don't recall Henry Pleasants
saying much
about the phonographic technology in his book either. Yes, you admit
that you
disagree with several of his premises. But are you aware that just
before his
death he said to his friend, the critic John Rockwell, that we lost the
battle?
What he was saying was that the sheer tenacity of living composers has
kept
that "slag pile" (as he referred to contemporary music idea) quite
alive. So we should no more denounce tenacity than we should put up on
a pedestal
the new investor society of today that is destroying true American
values with
its bottom line mentality. I would much rather hear a cling-clang-clong
piece
by David Lang than listen to another speech by El Presidente telling
Americans
how proud they should be to see democracy being spread to the rest of
the world
... If tenacity to continue to explore the art of sound is what it
takes to
keep our ears alive and in critically good condition, then I am for it.
Barry L. Cohen
Publisher, New Music
Connoisseur
[This letter is a response to
my 2001
column, "Why does modern music sound so
bad?"
Thanks for writing. There
certainly is some good new music being produced in our era.
I just
came out of a rehearsal with the Northern Arizona University trombone
choir,
which is playing a couple of interesting contemporary pieces this
semester.
When I lived in Boston, I used to go to a lot of new-music performances
at
Mobius -- and some of them were provocative and edifying. The school of
modern
music I'm not interested in is that typified by the
amplified-compass-needle
guy I dissed in my column. Who did he think he was kidding, with that
sort of
nonsense?
As for the "Eroica" having
been controversial in its day, well, it certainly was -- but by and
large,
Beethoven and his contemporaries were considered modern geniuses --
sometimes,
they even made some money from ticket sales and music publishing. They
cared
about reaching an audience. If you don't write music that speaks to
people,
you're not accomplishing anything. And that's just as true of jazz as
"legit" composers/performers. That's why I pointed to Bela Fleck and
the whole progressive-bluegrass school -- who play to more people in
one night
than most jazz musicians see in a year -- as the true heirs to the
art-music
throne, in the jazz/improvised music arena.
Not sure what to say about
recorded
music, except that especially when it's portable, it has trivialized
the act of
listening; when there's music everywhere, all the time, we forget how
to
listen. One of the most valuable lessons I learned in my collegiate
music study
(the first time I went through college, that is) was the simple fact
that music
is something you SIT DOWN AND LISTEN TO. If it's not getting 100% of
your
attention, you're wasting your time. But try explaining that to the
iPod
generation. People laughed at John Philip Sousa's worries that recorded
music
would displace the live product -- but in retrospect, he wasn't as
wrong as
everyone thought.
Agreed on El Presidente Shrub,
by the
way -- you may have missed my 2000 election column in which I described
him as
a "dunce." Some 4-1/2 years later, I'd say that was one of my better
calls.... ed.]
Still blowin' in the wind
November 19, 2003: he yoo some of us make our living doing
this kind of
work if you cant stand the noise plug your ears ha ha ha thanks john
[As usual in such cases, I'm
running this
letter unedited -- sic! sic! sic!, as they used to say in Verbatim, the
Language Quarterly. I guess it goes to show that maybe leaf-blowing is
a viable
career path -- it made this clown enough money to buy a computer, if
not to
learn how to use it properly. In case you want to, er, sound off
regarding his
attitude toward leaf-blower noise, have
at it... ed.]
Noise -- even in Idaho!
March 4, 2003: I agree wholeheartedly about the leaf
blowers and
other similar noise (Leaf Blower Power Squadrons,
10/27/98). I live in Idaho and they have the same noise ordinance.
What's a
person suppose to do during the day to stop noise? We are dealing with
neighbors that allow their kids to bounce basketballs into their
portable hoop
in the driveway for three hours a day average and more on weekends. It
penetrates through all the walls of our house. The ball often rolls or
gets
rebounded off our car.
The police say they can't do
anything. Do
you have any ideas or tips to get this to stop?
Thanks,
Barb Rowling
[Wow -- I guess noise problems
aren't
just for big cities anymore! Although I barely mentioned bouncing
basketballs
in my column, they were actually a more serious annoyance, back in
Highland
Park, than the leaf blowers. We were sandwiched in between two houses
with
small children -- and, as this was suburban Chicago during the height
of the
Michael Jordan era, basketball mania was in full swing. We often had
marathon
hoop games going on on both
sides of our house simultaneously.
The effect was
much like living inside a big snare drum -- at times, I had to wear ear
plugs
just to take a nap, in my own house, on a weekend afternoon. The kids'
parents
were completely unresponsive to our requests that they do something
about the
noise; their attitude was, "This is a suburb, and the main purpose of a
suburb is to function as a kids' playground. If you don't like it, get
lost."
Well, we did get lost -- we got
the heck
out of Highland Park and moved to Flagstaff late in '99. What's more,
we bought
five acres of land, off a dirt road in an area where no one's got a
paved
driveway. I can't say it was entirely to get away from noise that we
did this,
but that certainly had something to do with it.... ed.]
Let the good times blow
March 15: [Noise] sounds like a small price to pay
for living
in a nice place ("Leaf Blower Power Squadrons," October 27,
1998). Neat lawns are nice to look at and alot of work to keep
up.The bottom
line the guy that owns this lawn care business wants to make money same
as
yourself .
Gabe Moore
Proprietor, Screamin' Poulan Performance Exhausts
[I think we can safely assume
Mr. Moore
works the 7:00-to-3:00 shift.... ed.]
Blowin' in the wind
October 27: In my old 'hood the [leaf blower] noise
was
incessant. And, as you say, they're usually used
incorrectly. I
almost choked once because some guy was clearing the dirt that had
accumulated
at the end of the lane. All he did was blow up huge clouds of
dust.
Maybe they should give you an IQ test before allowing you to use one!
Phrenchy
Vancouver, BC
Rice burners forever!
September 18, 2002: I just read your Ode
to a
rice burner and I want to know if it is still alive. I own a
1989
Hyundai Excel with 271,000 Km on the odometer. Like the rice burner it
has
always been an example of reliability, and got through 13 Canadian
winters with
no problem. It's a 4-speed manual running at 4200 Rpm at 65 MPH. After
so many
kilometers and revolutions it runs almost like day 1 and don't burn a
drop of
oil. If you have any spare time, please tell me another part of the
rice burner
history!
Nic B»gin
Canada
[Thanks for writing! As for my
Hyundai,
I'm afraid I no longer have it. In late 1999, my wife and I moved from
Chicago
to Flagstaff, Arizona. We had two other vehicles, and I decided not to
take the
Hyundai. It had about 160,000 miles on it, and although it still ran
well, the
engine was down on compression, the suspension was shot, the front end
wiggled,
and the body was starting to rust. So I gave it to my mechanic (the
Bernardi
Bros. of Highwood, Illinois, who I mentioned in the column). I have no
idea
what they did with it -- but for all I know, it could still be running!]
Rice burners rule!
January 20, 2000: I just came across your website while
surfing for
info on my Hyundai Excel. I have to tell you how much I enjoyed your
article
"Ode to a Rice Burner." I have a 1994 Hyundai Excel Hatchback and
it's the BEST car I've ever had! I haven't had to replace anything
outside the
normal maintenance items, except for a bad O2 sensor last week. It just
turned
80,000 and still runs great. I was teased and ridiculed when I bought
it, but
couldn't afford anything else at the time. It turns out the "teasers"
who drive BMWs and similar types of cars have had MANY things go wrong
with
them -- but not my Hyundai! It starts right up when its 30 below zero,
which is
also when my neighbors's Lexus doesn't. It has never overheated in the
summer
(I don't have air conditioning though). It has gotten me through 6
cold, snowy
Minnesota winters and always starts and never gets stuck. I also like
to take
"road-trip" vacations too; the little Excel has taken me to Disney
World in Orlando, to the top of the Smokey Mountains in Tennessee, to
Pennsylvania and the east coast and also through parts of the old Route
66! I
also followed some of the highways all the way through Missouri and
through
part of Illinois. I smiled when I read your article because your
faithful Excel
sounds a lot like mine. Those cars got such a bad rap and I'm sure
there are
some out there that do have problems (as with any make of car), but it
looks
like we got the good ones! Anyway, I just wanted to let you know I
enjoyed your
story, it brightened my day and makes me think to myself, "See -- I'm
not
the only one who likes my little Excel!".
Best regards,
Deb Rodden
Mpls, Minnesota
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