Glenn Gould and the
Metaphysics of Music
When listening to or performing music, many people have experienced the “oceanic feeling,” variously described as an altered state of consciousness, a sensation of limitlessness, an experience of eternity, oneness with the universe, an ideal dream where you are held in a weightless reverie and lose the boundaries of your self.
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The Most Famous Scandal
in the History of Music
“I dreamed of a scene of pagan ritual in which a chosen sacrificial virgin danced herself to death.” —Igor Stravinsky
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David Bowie Dies and Lives
The visual style of Bowie’s image on the album cover—an homage to a classic Hollywood portrait of Marlene Dietrich—and the melodic beauty, longing, and rapture of such songs as “Life on Mars,” “Changes,” and “Oh, You Pretty Things” took my adolescent imagination captive in black flowers of sound and poetry.
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Glenn Gould: The Russian Journey
Musicians and other attendees, shocked by the sublimity and electrifying modernity of his Bach, ran to the telephones to alert their friends. Composers and professors of music, students, poets and philosophers grabbed their coats and rushed to the concert hall. The second half of the concert was sold out.
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The Poles Save Western
Civilization. Again.
King of Poland Jan Sobieski’s famous victory over the invading Ottoman Turks at the 1683 Battle of Vienna saved Western civilization. Flying the banners of the Black Madonna before them, 27,000 Poles routed the jihadists with 28 cannon and the largest cavalry charge in history, Sobieski in the vanguard.
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A Love Letter to Lhasa de Sela
I fell in love with Lhasa de Sela in a Montreal community centre hall, converted to resemble a New York nightclub in 1940, with large round tables arranged like planets around a life-giving sun. I was struck by Lhasa’s beguiling voice, angular beauty, charismatic modesty, and the hush and rumble of drums, harp, guitars, trumpet, accordion . . .
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A Tale Told by a Romantic,
Signifying Everything
The author of The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, Prussian storyteller, jurist, composer, music critic, draftsman and caricaturist E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822), rebelled against Enlightenment excess, with its emphasis on rational philosophy and the curtailing of the imagination. He and his German Romantic confrères strove to . . .
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Unless Philosophy Can Make a Juliet
The most famous love story of all time endures because it is far more than a love story. It endures because it gives tangible and visible form to a vision of life, of society and politics, of violence and war, of meaning, of philosophy, of poetry, even of religion.
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Shanghai Ballet Perpetrates Coppélia
A frivolous show! Inconsequential! What, are the classic fairy tales of art now pointless, verboten, haram? Should art exist to nullify imagination, to police thought, and to cobble together the most politically correct, socio-economically just society, with universal, obligatory, social housings of the mind?
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Anna Karenina: Dancing
on the Grave of Love
In the rapture of love, she strives toward the selfhood and inner peace that love cannot by itself endow. Even in her exalted state, she cannot find an unwavering self or an untroubled peace. How can she then experience the flames of love, outside her disappointing 19th century icebox marriage, except by melting into a dangerous passion?