Sonata, She Wrote

What was your favorite early clas NOT in your eventual major. Mine was Ethnomusicology: an introduction to folk music.

I am wondering what Natalie Wynn (contrapoints) could’ve said about Israel that wouldn’t have resulted in an internet dogpile.

There are only three political positions in America today

1) I like the fascism

2) I'll acquiesce to the fascism (reasons for this one vary: cowardice, access, denial, misguidedly thinking that acquiescence is savvy, etc)

3) I oppose the fascism

The rest is details

Ohio State announces it is now a joke.

A chessboard from chess.com showing 2 knights giving checkmate

Don’t ask my elo but just know I’m way prouder of this checkmate than I should be

If equal temperament has 1,000,000 haters, I am one of them.
If equal temperament has 1 hater, it is me.
If equal temperament has 0 haters, I am dead.

I think it’s time to reverse the curse everyone, we need to go back before the early modern era and set things right, I will be attempting to turn back time by playing the lute and using only 16th century chess openings, do your part.

The dog in question, 13 year old Merlin, a lab-hound mix.

Something that surprises me about having a 13 year old dog is that I have to tell him to slow down so he doesn’t get hurt. A truly bizarre combination of geriatric and toddler behavior

Every time I see Musk’s name in media it should be formatted like this

Elon Musk, who recently gave 2 Nazi salutes, …

“Clap on 2&4 never on 1&3!”

Hey. Stop clapping! You’re bothering me

Love those groovy covers! And that album

Posting like: who’s minority leader of the house, I would like a word with them!

I just finished Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. I liked it a lot but mostly I just want to say that I finished it because it’s almost 3000 pages long.

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. …To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. — Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.

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EXCITING ANNOUNCEMENT:

Assigned Media will be doing our first ever live Twitch stream this Monday.

Our trans journalists are counterprogramming the Trump inauguration. They'll play games, goof off, answer questions, and update you on the news, occasionally.

We've even got a special guest!

Luckily it’s easy to find lots of info that’s not conveniently threaded together based on the book, the podcast Historiansplaining has several eps that cover various topics in early modern Europe and they’re a favorite.

Halfway through the final novel of Neal Stephenson’s baroque cycle, and/or halfway through the 7th of 8 novels of the BC. Has anyone read this? I love it. I wish someone with actual credentials would do a historical series unpacking the history of the era the book is focused on.

Reporting to you from the other side of the rag, Glickman crushed it. it also seems I may have gotten the year wrong, the label on the LP says 1978 but I assume it must be the year of reissue as Stokowski died in 77. He was active til the end but was exclusive with Columbia beginning 76.

Stravinsky Histoire du Soldat [A Soldier’s Tale] ensemble info in alt text of next picture, album art depicts the soldier playing his violin attended by his gf, while the devil sneaks up behind him

Igor Stravinsky Speaking roles (In both French and English versions) MADELEINE MILHAUD, Narrator JEAN PIERRE AUMONT, the Soldier MARTIAL SINGHER, the Devil L'HISTOIRE DU SOLDAT (The Soldier's Tale) Libretto by C. F. Ramuz Instrumentalists Gerald Tarack, violin Julius Levine, double bass Charles Russo, clarinet Loren Glickman, bassoon Theodore Weis, trumpet John Swallow, trombone Raymond Desroches, percussion Conducted by LEOPOLD STOKOWSKI

Listening to a 1978 recording of Histoire du Soldat conducted by stokowski, probably one of my all time favorite pieces and if you’re a bassoonist incredibly fun to play (and wickedly hard!). Loren Glickman is crushing it on this record-although I haven’t gotten to the ragtime yet…

I say we rename Beethoven’s Große Fugue as one of the following

Beethoven’s Fat Ass Fugue
Big ‘n’ Juicy Fugue
Oh that fugue? She thicc.
Gyat-DAMN that fugue!
Dat fugue doe
Big Ol’ Fugue

Who’s with me!?

Top text of pg 1-2: A collection of 24 Magnificent Stereo Albums Every Home Should Have Page 1 of an included advertisement for the library which includes the selection process and pictures of the 24 albums

Bottom text from pg 1-2: 66 Musical Masterpieces Selected by Experts for your Family’s Enjoyment Page 2 of the ad for the family library, continued pictures of the included albums

Back page of the advert, includes the image of a wonderfully stylish binder to house all the included biographies, free with your purchase of album 2!

Some more images from inside the included brochure, I’m definitely going to have to track down this exclusive binder to store all the included composer biographies in

Funk and Wagnalls Family Library of Great Music, album 1. Beethoven’s pathetique. Played by the RPO and conducted by Charles Grove.

Reverse of the album. The collection is from 1966 originally, but this was printed and pressed in 1984, which explains the number of “the late…” on the advisory committee

Cover of the included brochure for the library of 24 albums, bassoon prominently featured of course

Have you always wanted to Capture the sounds of great music? Well now thanks to Funk and Wagnalls Family Library of Great Music, you can!
I love finding things like this, especially ones with all the parts but I hate how tempted I am to track down all 24! More details in the alt texts

That’s exactly how I felt playing as 1/2 of a continuo unit with a modern bassoon!

Absolutely, the stuff of nightmares!

Lock me up if you want to but I think harpsichord sounds really dumb when paired with modern instruments.

No one’s more of a period ensemble girly than me (ok some of you probably are). But with a modern flute, bassoon, and tourte bows? it just sounds like a tinkly annoyance behind everyone.

I just finished traveling across the country by plane with a toddler in tow. This clarified something for me;

We should build high speed rail not because it'd produce far less pollution and be cheaper than flying.

We should build high speed rail because flying has become abusively degrading.

A man in a green sweater and blue shirt drawing with crayons across three pictures. "Do you like to draw with crayons. I'm not very good at it but it doesn't matter"

A man in a green sweater and blue shirt drawing with crayons across three pictures. "It's the fun of doing it that's important. Now, I wouldn't have made that if I'd just thought about it."

A man in a green sweater and blue shirt drawing with crayons across three pictures. "No matter how anybody says it is. It feels good to have made something. The best thing is that each person's would be different."

A man in a green sweater and blue shirt drawing with crayons across three pictures. "In a way, you've already won in this world because you're the only one who can be you and that's the way it's supposed to be."

Fred Rodgers on the importance of making something even if other people don't think it's good had me crying this morning. Passing it along for anyone else that might need it.

The young Richard Strauss, after writing two symphonies, insisted that he did not believe in the form. He wrote tone-poems instead - and in several cases preferred not to call them by that name either. In 1894 he married Pauline de Ahna, a high-spirited, strong-willed operatic soprano. Their only child, Franz, was born in 1897. Strauss had progressively extended his symphonic poems from the concise Macbeth (1888) to the lengthy Ein Heldenleben (1898). All these symphonic poems were about some hero with whom the composer more or less consciously identified himself; they are masterly constructions for large symphony orchestra. In early 1902 he began work on a further tone-poem which would be expressly about his own home-life, Father, Mother and Son, invaded only for a moment by adoring relations. He finished composing this tone-poem in F major, which he entitled a "Domestic Symphony" ', in June 1903 while he, his wife, and their son were holidaying in the Isle of Wight. On his return to Berlin, where he was musical director of the Imperial Court Opera, he scored the work and completed it on New Year's Eve 1903. During a tour of America Strauss conducted the first performance at Carnegie Hall, New York, in March 1904. The introduction first exposes five themes describing Father: easy-going on cellos; dreamy on oboe, moody on clarinets, fiery on violins, and (after more moodiness), high-spirited on a trumpet; the easy-going theme returns for a moment. The second group is about Mother: loud on flutes, oboes and first violins (it is Papa's first theme upside down, to show that they are well-matched op-posites). The mother has a further variety of themes, forthright and clearly audible: she is supposed to be rough-tempered but full of feeling. One of her themes comes from a piano waltz by Tchaikovsky (a taunt against her husband's lack of originality). Father's first theme returns, even more affable than before, perhaps calming her tantrum.

Listening to Sinfonia Domestica, a digital recording from 1984 but it was also 75 cents. Perfectly good as a placeholder til I can find a better recording of it.

Album cover of Mahler’s second symphony “Resurrection,” conducted by Walter with the Mew York Phil. Photo by the Lick observatory, unfortunately the record doesn’t say what the photo is of

Notes by BRUNO WALTER In 1888, Mahler had finished his First Symphony. In this audacious and vehement work, he had given deeply stirring musical expession to a heart-rending personal experience. With the conclusion of that symphony, the 28-year-old composer seems to have outgrown a self-centered urge to tell in his music of the jubilations and torments of his own youthful heart. Like Goethe in Werthers Leiden, he overcame a grave emotional crisis by expressing it in his art. The sufferings of mankind became the center of his inner life; an ever-growing consciousness of man's tragic destiny on earth dominated his soul. Such development was based, of course, on the moral foundation of Mahler's nature and so, after his first symphonic venture — or perhaps through it - Mahler had risen to a stage of maturity at which he could envision the sublimity of his Second Symphony.

Within the limits of these introductory comments, I cannot enter into a professional analysis or a detailed discussion of a work of such exceptional scope. For my purpose, some general remarks must suffice. Mahler's work is not a religious message in symphonic language; it is a symphony, conveying a religious message; it is primarily a musician's, not a prophet's expression. The composer, whose creative mind abounded with musical ideas, derived from them a musical language in symphonic form and expressed by this medium the emotions of his heart. He was at home in the world of music and he would have denied indignantly having other intentions than musical ones; he never wrote a "sym-phonic poem" of programmatic contents like Richard Strauss' Don Juan or Death and Transfiguration. Certainly his soul was moved by an abundance of visions, thoughts, emotions, impressions—and it could not fail that those inner experiences influenced the music he wrote. But the highest rule in his creative work remained the symphonic form. So I suggest the listener approach the three first movements just as what they are and are intended to be: symphonic music. In contrast to them, the fourth and fifth movements reveal their lofty spiritual meaning in words. Urlicht tells us of the author's heart in the following verses

#Spinning Mahler 2 conducted by Bruno Walter. I have Bernstein’s coming in the mail in a few days and wanted to refamiliarize myself with it. Great performance, and I hadn’t realized the liner notes were written by Walter, I’ve put some excerpts in the alt text as usual #vinyl

The media should be asking why, in almost every comment thread about the fatal shooting of the United Healthcare CEO, most of the comments are either supportive of the shooter's actions, or are of the "well, that's what you get", variety.