A Sad Day

Today Ligeti died. I cannot help but feel a personal loss: he was perhaps my favorite living composer. I've always thought of him as something of a carnival barker, a ringmaster presiding over a world of hysterical, phantasmagoric, vivid sound, posessed of something too rare: a thoroughly original voice. His music--even the early, thorny string quartets--always bristles with quirk, never satisfied with simply being "in a camp." He always grew; he always changed; and he always mis-heard whatever was around him in the most deft and fascinating way.

For years I have kept a mental talley of favorite operas that will never be written, to the anguish of all of us who love music: Stravinsky's collaboration with Dylan Thomas; Benhamin Britten's incomplete Anna Kerenina; Copland's discussed collaboration with Thornton Wilder; whatever Chekov and Tchaikovsky might have done together; Beethoven's Bacchus; Wagner's life of Jesus; Brahms'. Now I, sadly, will add Ligeti's Alice in Wonderland to the list--unless someone out there knows something I don't.

Now, as I type, I am listening to those honking carhorns at the beginning of the recently departed composer's operatic masterpiece Le Grand Macabre and smiling. Music this mad, this ingenious, this demented, deserves to be loved.

Fascinating

This article on the front page of the Times is a fascinating look at cellphone rings pitched so high only children (and presumably dogs) and dogs can hear. The new signaling, to the youth, of the forbidden text. Strange, very strange indeed.

Stolen Years, Forced Pain

The silence in the American Media (the Liberal media mind you, at least according to the loudmouths) has been palpable about RFK Jr.'s phenomenal dissection of the 2004 election. In it, he not just postulates but proves that the last presidential election was stolen, that Ohio, lord help us, determined who might lead us for the coming years. We all suspected it; we all whispered it; now someone--RFK Jr. no less--has the courage to say it. And was this even mentioned in the Times or on CNN, not to mention MSN or elsewhere? Of course not.

So go and read it, tell everyone you know. This sort of third world realpoliticking cannot happen again. It can happen here; it did happen here, twice. We have to stop it.

Once Again, Sorry Felsenreaders

Family commitments and general end-of-the-term malaise has caused a temporary lull in blogging, alas. But soon I'll be blogging up a storm about the fantastic records I've been listening to and books I've been reading--or perhaps even confess that I saw the wretched Da Vinci Code. Soon, gentle readers, soon...