Archives for August 26, 2009

For those who’ve been following the brouhaha over my Wall Street Journal column about the shrinking adult audience for live jazz in America, I’ll be appearing today on Soundcheck, WNYC’s daily talk show about music, to discuss what I said–and didn’t say–with John Schaefer, the host.
Soundcheck airs live at two p.m. EDT. If you live in the New York City area, you can listen to WNYC via terrestrial radio by tuning to 93.9 FM. Go here for more information on today’s episode or to listen live via streaming audio on your computer.

Dennis Brain and Denis Matthews perform Beethoven’s Horn Sonata:

(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

“Am I happy? Probably not. Having passed the prescribed biblical age limit, I have to think of death, and I do not like the thought. There is a vestigial fear of hell, and even of purgatory, and no amount of rereading rationalist authors can expunge it. If there is only darkness after death, then that darkness is the ultimate reality and that love of life that I intermittently possess is no preparation for it. In face of the approaching blackness, which Winston Churchill facetiously termed black velvet, concerning oneself with a world that is soon to fade out like a television image in a power cut seems mere frivolity. But rage against the dying of the light is only human, especially when there are still things to be done, and my rage sometimes sounds to myself like madness. It is not only a question of works never to be written; it is a matter of things unlearned. I have started to learn Japanese, but it is too late; I have started to read Hebrew, but my eyes will not take in the jots and tittles. How can one fade out in peace, carrying vast ignorance into a state of total ignorance?”
Anthony Burgess, You’ve Had Your Time, Being the Second Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess