Representative repertoire

Representative repertoire

I find it such a weird time in our culture. MMEA is being celebrated for branching out beyond the standard repertoire, and they rightly should be, but here are the things I don’t understand. For all the people that are somehow just now discovering that there are...

Is all music supposed to be in the academy?

A friend passed along the recent New York Times article from Sept. 6, 2020 by Giovanni Russonello entitled, “Is Jazz Capable of Meeting This Moment?” In the article, they talk to historian Robin D.G. Kelley about teaching jazz in the University. He says,...

Response to article

My friend Garrett sent me an article 17 months ago. I wrote a response and forgot about it. He just sent it to me in case I wanted to post it. I’m posting it. My friend Garrett recently sent me an article to get my thoughts. The article is arguing for a new...

Ancient world and lists

I will often listen to something while I’m eating breakfast. Lately, it’s been the Lotus Sutra. On the same day that there was a list of names in the daily reading for morning prayer, I heard this passage from the sutra from the parable of the burning...

Steven Pinker is frustrating me as usual 3/14/20

Sitting at home instead of on a plane to Ireland today. All the gigs have been cancelled. All the international trips have been cancelled. So I hit a downward spiral and listened to Robert Wrights interview with Steven Pinker. There is hardly a thinker alive that...

Rabbi Sacks gets it wrong

Normally, Jonathan Sacks is one of my favorite thinkers, and he’s also normally pretty careful. He gets a couple things wrong in his recent essay. I’ve reprinted part of it below. “Some measure of the radicalism that is introduced into the world by...

3/9/20 pan-psychism

Listened to Robert Wright interview Galen Strawson about pan-psychism. I think David Bentley Hart is correct on this. The pan-psychists are trying to solve the problem by mashing it down to the sub-atomic level, but it’s really just a shell game. The horizon is...
#Carolragnarok 2019 compilation

#Carolragnarok 2019 compilation

Here is the first collection of videos from this year. It’s my side of the contributions. John Conahan and I will work on some more to make them more easily available. I started with a Liszt O Tannebaum. I borrowed a little from Liebestraum. Next I tried a...

Rastafarian…sort of

Once upon a time, I was practicing the organ at St. Mark’s on the Campus in Lincoln, Nebraska. Unbeknownst to me, a stranger wandered off the street, and he managed to make his way, silently, up to the organ loft. I was in the middle of a passage that was giving...

Luke 23:26-31

It was not many verses ago that Luke was telling us about Peter weeping bitterly after his denial. David Bentley Hart rightly points out that this is a big deal for Christian aesthetics. In the classical world, a minor peasant character wouldn’t have a personal...