In The Score, American composers on creating “classical” music in the 21st century.
I.
The year was 1977 and this 23 year-old composer arrived wet behind the ears to take up residence at the American Academy in Rome — home abroad to American artists and scholars since 1913 — as the youngest recipient of the Rome Prize Fellowship in Musical Composition. Elliott Carter, one of my heroes, had led the jury, and my String Quartet, a half-hour escapade in kinetic complexity, had apparently impressed them enough to send me there. My composing studio was in the Casa Rustica, rebuilt on the site of a 16th-century villa known as Casino Malvasia, where Garibaldi was defeated in a decisive battle by French forces in 1849, and near where Galileo demonstrated his “instrument,” later known as the telescope, in 1611, training it onto the dome of the Pantheon a little more than a mile down the Janiculum hill.
In the cradle of Western civilization, I came to understand the reasons why ‘art music’ had become the mess it had.
Thirty-four years later —in June 2011 — I sat in the Bass Studio as a resident at the same American Academy, beginning to write these words, perched high on the old Aurelian Wall, turtles and lizards as my companions, feeling the same fierce energy that surged through me those years ago.
Courtesy of Robert BeaserThe garden patio outside the Bass Studio, American Academy in Rome (June 2011).Certainly, much has changed. Everything is wired now. Information hurls at us, where before it was buried in the stacks of the Academy library. The food served now in the outside Cortile is all sustainable, much grown in the fragrant gardens beneath the studio; and the innocuous front gate-keeper of the past has been replaced by a more ominous (yet cheerful) dark suited, sunglass toting, Men-in-Black type, with an earpiece — a sign of America’s precarious politics.
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There are hungry people out there, actually; they’re just largely invisible to the rest of us, or they look so much like us that it’s hard to tell. The Supplemental Assistance Nutrition Program, better known as SNAP and even better known as food stamps, currently has around 46 million participants, a record high. That’s one in eight Americans — 10 people in your subway car, one or two on every line at Walmart.
We wouldn’t wish that on anyone, but as it stands, the number should be higher[1]: many people are unaware that they’re eligible for SNAP, and thus the participation rate is probably around three-quarters of what it should be.
Food stamps allow you to shop more or less normally, but on an extremely tight budget, around $130 a month. It’s tough to feed a family on food stamps (and even tougher without them), and that’s where food banks — a network of nonprofit, nongovernment agencies, centrally located clearing houses for donated or purchased food that is sent to local affiliated agencies or “pantries” — come in. Food banks may cover an entire state or part of one: the Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma, for example, serves 53 counties and provides enough food to feed 48,000 square miles and feeds 90,000 people a week — in a state with fewer than four million people.
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The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.
A new biography of Jacques Derrida has hit the shelves, written by Benoît Peters, whose last book was a life of the cartoonist and Tintin creator Hergé. The match is not terribly inappropriate: an elusive and much mythologized figure whose stature in certain circles seemed virtually superhuman, it’s not to demean his work to say that Derrida himself could sometimes seem ripped straight from the pages of an archly philosophical comic strip.
At The Guardian, Terry Eagleton considers Derrida as a thinker from the “honourable lineage of anti-philosophers” who was nevertheless “no nihilist.” He explains how Derrida, as a marginalized Algerian Jew, came to both celebrate the freedom, and suffer the limitations, of the “something within any structure that is part of it but also escapes its logic.”
At The London Review of Books, Adam Shatz confirms this picture of Derrida as a figure who learned to strive for separateness and thrive on exclusion. He also offers a much more extensive précis of Peters’s book, managing both a deft exposition of Derrida’s key ideas, and an admirably compressed account of the biographical high points. Or low points, depending on your point of view, for Derrida was a man who could both apologize fiercely for the “crimes” of Louis Althusser and Paul de Man, yet, in later years, under the influence of Benjamin and Levinas, develop into a kind of “globally attuned ethicist” in works that “revealed an old-fashioned moral outrage.”
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Democrats and the liberal media have been beating up on John McCain and other Republicans for waging a vigorous campaign against the entirely hypothetical possibility — it is the political equivalent of a derivative — that President Obama will nominate Susan Rice to be secretary of state. The president has responded by defending Rice and, in schoolyard fashion, daring her detractors to come after him, the real target.
J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press Sen. John McCain, joined by Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, said he would do all he could to block the nomination of Susan Rice as Secretary of State.They already have done that, and quite successfully; for by mounting what some say is an egregious attack on Rice, McCain and company have outflanked Obama and put him in a box even before there is a real issue on the table. It’s downright diabolical and it is brilliant. They have manufactured a conflict and then positioned themselves so that they can’t lose it.
Let us count the ways in which Obama’s room for maneuvering has been reduced to almost nothing.
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Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
Civil War soldiers carried many valuables: letters from home, photographs, and locks of hair from wives, sweethearts and babies. But they held a less romantic article much nearer to their hearts, and sometimes much dearer: their undergarments.
History favors epic battles, stirring speeches, presidents and generals and the economic and political forces that transform the lives of millions. Yet mere underwear has a story to tell, a story that covers the breadth of the Civil War, from home front to battlefield.
A full suit of mid-19th-century men’s underwear consisted of a shirt, “drawers” and socks. Like today, men’s underwear at the time, unlike women’s, did not provide structure to the body. Rather, cover, warmth and hygiene were the order of the day — though the hygiene part did not always work out. The term for undershirt was usually just “shirt”; shirts as we know them today were often called blouses or top-shirts. Undershirts were square-cut pullovers, voluminous and long. Buttons and sometimes laces at the neck fastened them. Read more…
The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.
Is God perfect? You often hear philosophers describe “theism” as the belief in a perfect being — a being whose attributes are said to include being all-powerful, all-knowing, immutable, perfectly good, perfectly simple, and necessarily existent (among others). And today, something like this view is common among lay people as well.
A God who is perfectly powerful can not also be perfectly good.
There are two famous problems with this view of God. The first is that it appears to be impossible to make it coherent. For example, it seems unlikely that God can be both perfectly powerful and perfectly good if the world is filled (as it obviously is) with instances of terrible injustice. Similarly, it’s hard to see how God can wield his infinite power to instigate alteration and change in all things if he is flat-out immutable. And there are more such contradictions where these came from. Read more…
Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.
The biographer has two lives: The one she leads, and the one she ultimately understands. The first is a muddle of misgivings and misapprehensions, hesitations and half-chances, devoted to the baggage carousel or the Netflix queue or wherever the empty calories of existence are served.
The second — the life the biographer pins to the page — has themes. It has chapters, a beginning, middle and end. Intentions align with actions, which bloom into logical consequences. The biographer is as cleareyed about the second as she is clueless about the first: It’s the kids-of-the-psychiatrist conundrum. In one realm you’re moving forward in ignorance. In the other you’re moving backward with something resembling omniscience. What manifests as suspense on the page feels disconcertingly like anxiety in real life. Read more…
Anxiety: We worry. A gallery of contributors count the ways.
Once upon a time a friend told me about a retreat house in the hills of California. I drove three hours north from my mother’s home and came upon an 800-acre spread, with golden pampas grass tumbling down to a great expanse of blue 1,200 feet below. The place was radiantly silent — save for bells tolling three or four times a day — and I was so far from telephone and laptop that I could lose myself for hours in anything at all, or nothing. At dusk, deer stepped into my private garden to graze; an hour later, I stepped out of my room and found myself under an overturned saltshaker of stars.
Rachell Sumpter The retreat house was the rare place where it seemed impossible to be fraught. All my worries of the previous day seemed about as real and urgent as the taillights of cars disappearing around headlands 12 miles to the south. I started to go to this place of silence more and more often, and one spring day, on my way to two weeks of carefree quiet, I told my old friend Steve about it. Much to my delight, he booked himself in for a three-day stay that would coincide with my final weekend in the sanctuary. Read more…
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Jason Polan is an artist.
Steven Rattner on economic policy, finance and business.
Almost lost in the tug of war over whether the top income tax rate should be 35 percent or 39.6 percent is another consequential tax issue: the proper rate for capital gains and dividends.
It was the absurdly low rate on those forms of income — just 15 percent — that yielded Mitt Romney’s embarrassingly small tax payments. And that’s what also led to Warren E. Buffett’s lament that his tax rate was lower than his secretary’s.
So as we scurry around looking for new revenue to help address the yawning budget deficit, let’s zero in on this special preference.
President Obama has proposed much of the needed adjustment, including eliminating the special treatment of dividends and raising the tax on capital gains to 20 percent for the rich. Read more…
