Sure you want the sasStalking; otherwise you couldn’t whip out your puns and make all us wee ungrammatical folk who support abortion, like the WP piece, and absolutely adore The Code out to be trogs.

I support your criticism of the musicology behind this article, but please keep in mind: Gene Weingarten is a comedy writer.

When I lived in DC I read his column on the ludicrous wonders of modern life every week. He’s the kind of person who writes to the Nigerian Bank Official you get those emails from and engages him is mock-serious negotiations.

While I don’t think this was one of Mr Weingarten’s best articles, I’m sure for his regular readers, it was received with a certain wink and nod that the writer is not a cultural aficionado and is looking at the work of a street musician the way most people do: from a position of ignorance.

If I can attempt to vindicate Mr. Weingarten in the slightest, I point you to this article he wrote in 2004, where he examined humans’ fear of death by actually visiting specific train and bus lines in Madrid and Jerusalem…places where the probability of death is actually greater than “normal.” And he still manages to do it with a certain wonky charm…I always get the idea he’s talking to his readers while playing with the change in his pocket…

Fear Itself; Learning to live in the age of terrorism
The Washington Post – Washington, D.C.
Author: Gene Weingarten
Date: Aug 22, 2004

“The meaning of life is that it ends.”
— Franz Kafka

YOU ARE NOT AFRAID OF TERRORISM, REALLY. You have weighed the facts and have concluded, rationally, that even if terrorists strike again in this country, the chances are negligible that you or anyone you know will be killed or injured. You feel no special tension when you place your seat tray in the upright position. You are old enough to have lived through other supposedly apocalyptic times, or you’ve surely heard about them — most famously, the silly spectacle of 1950s-era schoolkids giggling under their desks in anticipation of The Big One.

The recent warnings about terrorism during the election campaign have ratcheted up your concerns a little, but so what? You are going on with your life not as an act of defiance so much as a celebration of rationality. You will be fine.

So here’s a question: Would you ride a bus in Jerusalem? Right now? Here’s your 5 1/2 shekels, go take a bus to market, buy some figs. Pick a bad day, after the Israelis have assassinated some terrorist leaders and everyone is waiting for the second sandal to drop. There are lots of buses in Jerusalem — the odds are still long in your favor. Do you take that dare?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Email me or post back and and I will send you the whole article.

Best,
HLD/

Nico responds: come on, now. Who this is. Don’t sasstalk on my space. You (singular) know perfectly well that the plural form is y’all.

But it’s always an easy task for a journalist to demonstrate that we are all philistines and then be ruefully bemused about it. Those who assume they would have stopped dead in their tracks feel superior; those who feel closer to the philistines can think, “Gosh, we’re all just so busy and have our iPods and stuff! I guess I’m just like everybody else!”

If this article won a Pulitzer prize it’s no doubt precisely because it was widely read and shared. That’s market success for journalists, and market success = quality. Right?

Ridiculous! I for one discovered your music on iTunes, and I’m sure at least some — if not a lot — of people on the D.C. subway are listening to Bell (who admittedly plays spectacularly live, something I experienced at a rehearsal for a concert he gave in Charleston.)

What’s that? Technology can enable new musical experiences? Crazy thought.

Love your music and can’t wait for the new CD,
Aymar

You know, we can continue to permit jests and jokes guised by post-modern ‘tolerance’, or you can admit that this is not a ‘fish-out-of-water’ context, hopefully thereby admitting some degree of shame if you at all respect the tradition of classical music – more than, say, matters of editorial style. You need either ears to hear music, or resolve enough to appreciate it on the page. If you need someone to frame great performance for you – that meaning intentional music intended to be heard (perhaps, by Muhly’s principles, ‘chamber music’? You know, music where it’s polite to listen) – you’re in a state of aesthetic disrepair. That’s all there is to this. If this isn’t an argument concerned with the erosion of culture, then it’s an argument concerning ‘elements of style’ or of Pulitzer Prizes. In that case, I think the Post journalist has liscense to write even awkwardly about perverted ‘priorities’.

How comfortable you are with this – whether as the result of philosophically eroding the notion of a ‘universal’, whether you can’t muster energy enough to genuinely appreciate that which you’re bent on ignoring – shouldn’t detract from the point: if you all want to maintain that this is a poorly written article, fine. Agreed. But if you want to maintain that you’re in whatever way above the subject matter, than your role as musicians – yes, even ‘contemporary’ musicians – is suspect. Your collective ‘cleverness’ is truly offensive in that regard.

[Nico responds: The Chaconne can do anything it wants to! My only point is that the experiment is ridiculous because it’s like saying, who is going to notice this incredibly beautiful but compared-to-rush-hour-noise not very loud piece of music?]

b) Why should a Lichtenstein mural deserve less attention than a 14-minute piece of solo string music? That mural spans 90 years of New York subway history. Surely you can’t take it all in in 60 seconds? Perhaps visual art’s potential to unfold in time is greater than you presume. I think a great irony of the mural, and of metro music, is that most will not stop to watch or listen; but those who do, who really want to, and who value an understanding of at least a sizeable portion of the work, can get just what they want.

[Oh, see, here I disagree; my relationship with that Lichtenstein is not about stopping but it’s about getting a little snippet of it every morning. Times Square is a transfer station; who even knows how many people rush through there every morning. I think that after about two years of running through every morning between 9:00 and 9:15 I spent a good deal of time with it! If you think about religious art, too, like an altar painting, there are only specific times when you have access to it…this doesn’t bother me.]

Muzak is a large can of worms, but possibly its greatest distinction from much other music is, with its hints of the familiar and smooth, subconscious strands of popular tunes, its evasion of our time perception altogether.

I’d have been surprised if MORE people stopped to listen. Bell’s haul seems higher than I’d expect. There was no failure of classical music or art or this modern world. The experiment was rigged to fail, although the riggers may not have realized that themselves. But I smiled all the way through those videos. Good for Weingarten for having such a fun idea and making it happen — and then, with the help of, say, Mark Leithauser, even treating it somewhat thoughtfully.

I hope you have had the pleasure of reading “Language Log” – definitely the hottest linguistics blog out there – on the prose stylings of Dan Brown. Seminal post and links to later ones at –

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000844.html