“In February, the New York Philharmonic announced its 2012-13 season, the orchestra’s fourth under the leadership of Alan Gilbert, whose appointment as music director was the source of much favorable press when it was announced in 2007. No such reaction greeted the news that the Philharmonic would be offering its audiences, among other things, a four-concert Bach series, the symphonies and concertos of Brahms, and a concert version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel. Outside of the usual pro forma story in the New York Times, the silence was deafening…”
Archives for May 1, 2012
TT: After the fact
Mrs. T and I are in Chicago this week, and I’m going to be busy throughout our stay there, so in lieu of blogging today, I’m posting a video interview that I did in 2009. The occasion was the publication of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong. The interview was conducted by the folks at Big Think, an exceedingly interesting website that is insufficiently well known.
Big Think recently posted this interview on YouTube. If you didn’t happen to see it in 2009, you might possibly be interested in seeing what I had to say back then:
TT: Lookback
From 2004:
Since we’re on the subject of me, my brother and his daughter were looking at Smalltown High School yearbooks at the dinner table last night, some of which were published back when I edited the high-school newspaper. That was–gulp–30 years ago. As my niece made fun of the hair styles of 1974, I found myself recalling some of the ways in which I first became aware of the larger world of art and culture, and it occurred to me that in lieu of a more formal chronicle, it might be interesting to draw up a list of cultural firsts….
Read the whole thing here.
TT: Almanac
“What makes the vanity of others insufferable to us is that it wounds our own.”
François de La Rochefoucauld, Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims, Maxim 389.