Mark Likes Music

Today, the New York Times classical-music critics each picked two contemporary operas of note , one of which was to have found a "niche" in the repertoire. Here's what Steve Smith picked : Robert Ashley's Perfect Lives is available on DVD , if you're interested, or you can watch it on YouTube. Someone on YouTube commented that they remembered this airing on the USA Network in the early '80s.

If you know Ernst Toch for anything, it's probably this: "Geographical Fugue"is a perfect tongue twister of a showpiece for high-school and university choirs, the kind of rhythmic, referential, kind-of-humorous diversion that moms and younger brothers love ("Hey ma, it's just a bunch of names of places! Lake Titicaca! Get it: titty-kaka? Ha!"). It certainly didn't start out that way . The "Geographical Fugue" was the third movement of  Gesprochene Musik ( Spoken Music ), which Toch premiered at the Berlin Festival of Contemporary Music in 1930 . Toch had not written the piece   to be performed live, but rather had it pre-recorded and played back at 45 rpm on a  gramophone:   Gesprochene Musik was a wry bit of musical experimentation, an early example of electronic experimentation shot through with Weimar-era modernist wit. Three years later, as the Nazis came to power, Toch's burgeoning career in Germany ended when he fled contine...

Matthew Yglesias, the day after Paul Walker died, explains the the popularity of the Fast and the Furious franchise in terms of increasing income inequality in America: In a world where the system increasingly seems to be rigged, it's natural to turn to the Dominic Torettos of the world as heroes. Yet Dom, for all his hard work, ingenuity, and undeniable skill doesn't really do anything useful or productive. He's a nice guy who's loyal to his friends and family. He lives by a code. And his outlook is increasingly appealing in an increasingly unequal America. But it's ultimately destructive of the social institutions needed to generate prosperity. In the Fast and the Furious movies, characters make choices that value personal relationships over  legal institutions; these decisions make perfect sense, according to Yglesias, to an audience that sees the societal game rigged so that the rich (presumably, not them) get richer while the poor stay where they are ...

It isn't until the end of his New York Times article "Who Killed The Catchphrase?," in which he spends much time discussing the media-consumption behaviors of millennials, that Teddy Wayne gets at what has really contributed to the diminished importance of those infectious punchlines to TV commercials: We are supplanting the catchphrase with GIF, Photoshop and Vine. As Ms. Fegley said, “It’s been replaced by viral videos and the eight million things we share every day.” The commercial catchphrase, meanwhile, has fallen, and it can’t get up. At one time, lines like "Where's the Beef?" or "Yo quiero Taco Bell" ruled not only TV, but were used in print and radio as well. Today, our culture has become increasingly visual, and the easily transferable catchphrase is now the shareable meme-image or video. We're no longer as interested in listening as we are in looking--but we are still interested in sharing.

On the Times Higher Education website , Belinda Jack derides academic language as cliche that inhibits imagination: As a writer I am, needless to say, a supporter of books and reading. I am an interested party. But if we are to avoid being caught up in self-contained linguistic prisons where everything that is said is, in effect, repetition and cliché, then we have to attend to words and their efficacy. Academic jargon can create just such a closed space in which the initiated talk to one another and there are far too few reality checks. Peer review, rather than acting as a control, can further strengthen the in-language and in-thinking. The pressure on academics to contribute to the research excellence framework can be yet another threat to the independence and integrity of the academic as writer . I've read lots of criticisms of academic jargon online and railed against it myself as a grad student (you have not lived until you've sat through an afternoon of professiona...

Benjamin Britten's centenary is Friday, and while WQXR gives you five ways to celebrate , NPR.org reminds us that the composer spent time in Brooklyn and gives us a Britten cheat sheet . In his home country, the Guardian has been streaming performances all week from Aldeburgh Music , the festival that Britten founded.  If you like Wes Anderson, you probably know Britten. Moonrise Kingdom featured a lot of Britten's music, as Russell Platt of the New Yorker discussed , including the second movemenbt of Simple Symphony (start below around 3:20):

Crain's New York Business reported back on November 8 that the board of the Brooklyn Philharmonic is considering bankruptcy. Another victim of the financial downturn of 2008, the Brooklyn Philharmonic canceled its 2009-10 and 2010-11 seasons. While 2011-12, the orchestra's only full season with the now infamous Richard Dare as CEO and Alan Pierson as artistic director, was a great artistic success, they've been practically dormant since then. The New York Times also reported.