Song of a Reformed Headhunter

TLS September 11, 2009 from Stephen Brown's review of Richard Williams' "The Blue Moment: Miles Davis's "Kind of Blue" and the remaking of modern music": Try this experiment, sing the first seven notes of the major scale, doh, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti . . . and stop on that seventh tone, the "ti." You'll feel the aching incompleteness that so wants the satisfaction of a final "doh." This is the quality that makes "doh" the central tone of the scale, and makes us feel the other tones in relationship to it. A whole system of harmonies grew to support this centredness, granting the listener a reference place in musical space skin to the position in visual space that perspective grants the viewer of a picture. And like perspective, the tonal system was rejected by Modernists. In effect, there had been, by the 1930s, two "modern" revolutions in music: a violent one under Schoenberg and his twelve-tone system; and ...

from Gabriel Josipovici's Commentary piece on Modernism "Fail again. Fail better": Why is it that a composer such as Haydn could write a hundred symphonies and only a few years later Beethoven, no less industrious a composer, could only write nine? Quite simply because Haydn did not feel he had to start from scratch. What he had to do was fill a form, a mould. . . . Unfortunately, after Beethoven, . . . composers were left with nothing to hold on to except their individuality, and without Beethoven's dynamism and optimism, this gradually led, in the course of the nineteenth century, to an art less and less time-driven, more and more prone to stasis, dreaminess and disintegration. The composer at the start of the twentieth century, an Adrian Leverkuhn or an Arnold Schoenberg, was thus caught btween repeating forms he could no longer believe in and trusting a subjectivity which was growing daily more problematic. * Genres were the sign of submission to the authority of ...

from Peter Holland's review of William Shakespeare: the Complete Works , edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen: On King Lear--"The coronet, the commentary assures us, "must be of material that can be broken in half", but this is to read Lear's instruction to "part" it too literally, to assume that the speech and a stage-event are aligned. The exhilarating theatrical point may be precisely that the coronet cannot be divided, that, try as they might, neither Lear nor his sons-in-law can split the metal ring, that the circle, such a potent sign of wholeness, will not break--especially in a play fascinated by the way "The wheel is come full circle", as the dying Edmund puts it. *** from Barbara Everett's Commentary piece on biographies of Shakespeare, "Reade him, therefore": In an important sense Shakespeare did not live in his life, if by life we mean circumstantial existence. Neither a dreamy aesthete nor a dithering incompete...