Posts By: willcwhite

Surely we can do better than this…?

OK, a while back, I posted a blog entry about poor Esa-Pekka, who had been made to look so egregiously un-handsome by some LA press agent’s legerdemain, and now it’s maybe gotten worse…?

Picture 1

…to the point where I have to suspect that he is consciously choosing to present himself in the least flattering light, perhaps under the assumption that an ever-vivacious 50-something conductor/doyen does not a full-time serious composer make.

But at least he looks way less old-lesbianish in this more recent photo – more grizzled, more rugged, even kind of hot (I mean come on, those eyes…?)

But what, Dear Readers, are we to make of the following image??

Picture 2

To the credit of the New York Philharmonic, they did not choose their new Music Director for his looks. Maestro Gilbert never won any beauty competitions and that’s just fine – I’m sure he more than makes up for it in his probing interpretations.  But to the publicity department of the NYP: surely, surely we can do better than this… can’t we?

What happened to the days of composers and conductors having respectable portraits taken of themselves?

BE039387

ravel

shostakovich

And since we’re on the subject: where are the cigarettes in the first two photos??  As the portraits of Mssrs. Reiner, Ravel, and Shostakovich clearly reveal, any adult male classical musician who wants to be taken seriously needs to be photographed smoking a cigarette, regardless of whether he smokes in real life.  It wouldn’t hurt him to get his ass over to a piano and procure a large piece of manuscript paper either.

Pitted against their predecessors, the first two photos come of looking pretty amateurish.  Of course, certain advanced models should not necessarily be emulated:

lenny inappropriate

Sarafina’s Lament

Revels 2010.  In this song, the homely Sarafina sings a lament about how her mother keeps trying to use her as a fundraising tool for the University of Chicago by foisting her on wealthy suitors (I promise you I don’t write the plots for these shows.)

Some girls have mothers who drag them to soccer games
Hooting and howling, galore,
Then there are others who thrust their girls on the stage,
And wait in the wings as their ingénue sings,
And then rush them out the stage door.

Oh how nice it would be
If my mom would do that to me,
But rather than preening, routinging, and primping,
My mother sees me as ripe for the pimping.
So how’s a plain maiden, maternally laiden,
Expected to act like a whore?

Mother you are dreaming,
Mother, I am screaming,
Men at banks will guarantee
That they don’t want a girl like me.

Mother I am trying,
But Mother, I am dying,
How I wish that you could see
The lure you want is just not me.

Yes!! …No…

Too bad:

A New Plymouth woman who played classical music to her cannabis plants to encourage them to grow was yesterday sentenced to community work.

Solo mother-of-three Zarah Murphy cultivated 20 cannabis plants in a room with photos of healthy plants as role models on the walls and played them “nice classical music”, her lawyer Pamela Jensen told New Plymouth District Court yesterday.

Ms Jensen said Murphy was growing the plants for her own use, to treat her diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder, the Taranaki Daily News reported.

She was undergoing psychotherapy for her condition and could possibly attend drug counselling in future, Ms Jensen said.

Judge Allan Roberts said the converted room was a “pretty good effort” in which to grow the plants.*

He sentenced Murphy to 250 hours’ community work, including the remission of $1235 in unpaid fines.

– NZPA

*[Ed: umm…?]

marijuana_then_mahler

or the other way around….

Yet another quote from David Foster Wallace about Academic Prose that applies equally well to Academic Music

…the obscurity and pretension of Academic English can be attributed in part to a disruption in the delicate rhetorical balance between language as a vector of meaning and language as a vector of the writer’s own résumé.  In other words, it is when a scholar’s vanity/insecurity leads him to write primarily to communicate and reinforce his own status as an Intellectual that his English is deformed by pleonasm and pretentious diction (whose function is to signal the writer’s erudition) and by opaque abstraction (whose function is to keep anybody from pinning the writer down to a definite assertion that can maybe be refuted or shown to be silly).  The latter characteristic, a level of obscurity that often makes it just about impossible to figure out what an AE sentence is really saying, so closely resembles political and corporate doublespeak (“revenue enhancement,” “downsizing,” “proactive resource-allocation restructuring”) that it’s tempting to think AE’s real purpose is concealment and its real motivation fear.

DFW, “Authority and American Usage” from Consider the Lobster

Hence: https://www.willcwhite.com/audio/augusta%20trim.mp3

[Addendum: I do realize that the quote, the music, and the overall angsty anti-Modernist zeitgeist of this post are very 1990’s, but whatever — it still rings true, and as much as the situation may have changed, one must be ever vigilant.]