Dmitri Shostakovich tells this story of Alexander Glazunov’s astounding musical memory. Glazunov was one of Shostakovich’s teachers in St. Petersburg, and by all accounts his ability to retain and recapitulate music was perfect. Here’s the practical joke played upon a visiting composer, Sergei Taneyev:
“Taneyev had come to Petersburg from Moscow to show his new symphony, and the host hid the young Glazunov in the next room. Taneyev played. When Taneyev finished and rose from the piano, he was surrounded by the guests, who congratulated him, naturally. After the obligatory compliments, the host suddenly said, ‘I’d like you to meet a talented young man. He’s also recently written a symphony.’
“They brought Glazunov from the next room. ‘Sasha, show you symphony to our dear guest,’ the host said. Glazunov sat down at the piano and repeated Taneyev’s symphony, from beginning to end. And he had just heard it for the first time — and through a closed door.”
[Source: Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov. Translated by Antonina W. Bouis. New York: Harper and Row, 1979, p. 68.]
Posted 3 days ago at 11:40 am. 1 comment
According to Shostakovich:
“Rimsky-Korsakov used to say that he refused to acknowledge any complaints from composers 
about their hard lot in life. He explained his position thus: Talk to a bookkeeper and he’ll start complaining about life and his work. Work has ruined him, it’s so dull and boring. You see, the bookkeeper had planned to be a writer but life made him a bookkeeper. Rimsky-Korsakov said that it was rather different with composers. None of them can say that he had planned to be a bookkeeper and that life forced him to become a composer.”
[Source: Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov. Translated by Antonina W. Bouis. New York: Harper and Row, 1979, p. 65.]
Posted 6 days, 2 hours ago at 9:26 am. 1 comment
This is the fifth chapter of the audiobook version of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault.
Chapter Five: The Crisis of Socialism [mp3] [YouTube] [74 minutes total]
Marx and waiting for Godot [mp3] [YouTube]
Three failed predictions [mp3] [YouTube]
Socialism needs an aristocracy: Lenin, Mao, and the lesson of the German Social Democrats [mp3] [YouTube]
Good news for socialism: depression and war [mp3] [YouTube]
Bad news: liberal capitalism rebounds [mp3] [YouTube]
Worse news: Khrushchev’s revelations and Hungary [mp3] [YouTube]
Responding to the crisis: change socialism’s ethical standard [mp3] [YouTube]
From need to equality [mp3] [YouTube]
From Wealth is good to Wealth is bad [mp3] [YouTube]
Responding to the crisis: change socialism’s epistemology [mp3] [YouTube]
Marcuse and the Frankfurt School: Marx plus Freud, or oppression plus repression [mp3] [YouTube]
The rise and fall of Left terrorism [mp3] [YouTube]
From the collapse of the New Left to postmodernism [mp3] [YouTube]
Previous:
Chapter One: What Postmodernism Is [mp3] [YouTube] [38 minutes]
Chapter Two: The Counter-Enlightenment Attack on Reason [mp3] [YouTube] [72 minutes]
Chapter Three: The Twentieth-Century Collapse of Reason [mp3] [YouTube] [50 minutes]
Chapter Four: The Climate of Collectivism [mp3] [YouTube] [102 minutes]
Forthcoming:
Chapter Six: Postmodern Strategy [mp3] [YouTube]
Related:
The Explaining Postmodernism page.
Posted 1 week ago at 9:31 am. 1 comment
I am reading Wendy Steiner’s Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in 20th-Century Art. Steiner, a professor of literature at Penn,
argues that “In modernism, the perennial rewards of aesthetic experience — pleasure, insight, empathy — were largely withheld, and its generous aim, beauty, was abandoned” (p. xv).
Steiner notes that “the main symbol of such beauty, the female subject,” especially was abandoned in the twentieth century. “The avant-garde were utterly hostile toward the ‘feminine aesthetics’ of charm, sentiment, and melodramatic excess, which they associated with female and bourgeois philistinism” (pp. xxiv-xxv). (See also: Were the Modernist painters misogynist?)
All of which raises the question: Why? Steiner’s first statement of her thesis is that the experience of beauty is a profoundly relational experience. In philosopher-talk, it is neither purely an intrinsic feature of the object nor a purely subjective state. We are moved by the object, and “in our gratitude toward what moves us so, we attribute to it the property of beauty, but what we are actually experiencing is a special relation between it and ourselves” (p. xxiii).
Beauty is a connection between the self and the Other, but it also generates an elevating action component: “finding something or someone beautiful entails becoming worthy of it — in effect, becoming beautiful, too — and recognizing oneself as such” (xxiii). One is thus energized and challenged by the beautiful Other and “rises to recognize oneself in it” (p. xxiv).
Steiner’s account seems to imply that the full experience of beauty requires that one be a certain kind of person — capable of being so moved, of thinking oneself worthy and beautiful, of being energized to elevating challenges. That in turn seems to imply a profoundly different aesthetic for a profoundly different kind of person. What if, for example, one’s deepest sense of being is of estrangement, self-doubt, of an unbridgeable gulf between oneself and others, of alienation from reality?
The previous paragraph is my interpolation, but I was struck by the next step Steiner’s analysis, introducing 
“the Kantian sublime, which was the aesthetic model for high modernism” (xxiv).
In the Kantian sublime, Steiner points out, there is a supreme disconnect between the self and the Other. It is “specifically the non-recognition of the self in the Other, for the Other is inhuman, chaotic, annihilating.” The self realizes “the immensity of this gap” and is left “unfastened, unconnected to the object of its awe” (p. xxiv). There is no mutuality and no connection possible, so no action is worthwhile. One can only persist in the more sublime-relevant emotions of fear or awe or passive submissiveness. The Kantian sublime is an aesthetic of profound alienation.
And thus some groundwork is laid for Modernism’s “violent break” from the rest of art history.
Sources:
Steiner, Wendy. 2001. Beauty in Exile, The Rejection of Beauty in 20th-Century Art. The Free Press.
More quotations from various scholars connecting the Kantian sublime and modernism in art: Kant and Modern Art and More on Kant and Modern Art.
My “Why Art became Ugly.”
Posted 1 week, 3 days ago at 7:02 pm. Add a comment
This is the third chapter of the audiobook version of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault.
Chapter Three: The Twentieth-Century Collapse of Reason [mp3] [YouTube] [50 minutes]
Heidegger’s synthesis of the Continental tradition [mp3] [YouTube]
Setting aside reason and logic [mp3] [YouTube]
Emotions as revelatory [mp3] [YouTube]
Heidegger and postmodernism [mp3] [YouTube]
Positivism and Analytic philosophy: from Europe to America [mp3] [YouTube]
From Positivism to Analysis [mp3] [YouTube]
Recasting philosophy’s function [mp3] [YouTube]
Perception, concepts, and logic [mp3] [YouTube]
From the collapse of Logical Positivism to Kuhn and Rorty [mp3] [YouTube]
Summary: A vacuum for postmodernism to fill [mp3] [YouTube]
First thesis: Postmodernism as the end result of Kantian epistemology [mp3] [YouTube]
Previous:
Chapter One: What Postmodernism Is [mp3] [YouTube] [38 minutes]
Chapter Two: The Counter-Enlightenment Attack on Reason [mp3] [YouTube] [72 minutes]
Forthcoming:
Chapter Four: The Climate of Collectivism [mp3] [YouTube]
Chapter Five: The Crisis of Socialism [mp3] [YouTube]
Chapter Six: Postmodern Strategy [mp3] [YouTube]
Related:
The Explaining Postmodernism page.
Posted 3 weeks, 6 days ago at 7:19 pm. Add a comment
This is the second chapter of the audiobook version of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault.
Chapter Two: The Counter-Enlightenment Attack on Reason [mp3] [YouTube] [72 minutes]
Enlightenment reason, liberalism, and science [mp3] [YouTube]
The beginnings of the Counter-Enlightenment [mp3] [YouTube]
Kant’s skeptical conclusion [mp3] [YouTube]
Kant’s problematic from empiricism and rationalism [mp3] [YouTube]
Kant’s essential argument [mp3] [YouTube]
Identifying Kant’s key assumptions [mp3] [YouTube]
Why Kant is the turning point [mp3] [YouTube]
After Kant: reality or reason but not both [mp3] [YouTube]
Metaphysical solutions to Kant: from Hegel to Nietzsche [mp3] [YouTube]
Dialectic and saving religion [mp3] [YouTube]
Hegel’s contribution to postmodernism [mp3] [YouTube]
Epistemological solutions to Kant: irrationalism from Kierkegaard to Nietzsche [mp3] [YouTube]
Summary of irrationalist themes [mp3] [YouTube]
Previous:
Chapter One: What Postmodernism Is [mp3] [YouTube] [38 minutes]
Forthcoming:
Chapter Three: The Twentieth-Century Collapse of Reason [mp3] [YouTube]
Chapter Four: The Climate of Collectivism [mp3] [YouTube]
Chapter Five: The Crisis of Socialism [mp3] [YouTube]
Chapter Six: Postmodern Strategy [mp3] [YouTube]
Related:
The Explaining Postmodernism page.
Posted 1 month ago at 7:04 am. 12 comments
I’m happy to announce the audiobook version of my Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault. We’re releasing one chapter a week here and at YouTube. Thanks to Christopher Vaughan for his editing and production work. To begin, here is the first chapter.
Chapter One: What Postmodernism Is [mp3] [YouTube] [38 minutes]
The postmodern vanguard: Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida, Rorty [mp3] [YouTube]
Modern and postmodern [mp3] [YouTube]
Modernism and the Enlightenment [mp3] [YouTube]
Postmodernism versus the Enlightenment [mp3] [YouTube]
Postmodern academic themes [mp3] [YouTube]
Postmodern cultural themes [mp3] [YouTube]
Why postmodernism? [mp3] [YouTube]
Forthcoming:
Chapter Two: The Counter-Enlightenment Attack on Reason
Chapter Three: The Twentieth-Century Collapse of Reason
Chapter Four: The Climate of Collectivism
Chapter Five: The Crisis of Socialism
Chapter Six: Postmodern Strategy
Related:
The Explaining Postmodernism page.
Posted 1 month, 1 week ago at 3:58 pm. 1 comment
My colleagues Matt Flamm and Shawn Klein will lead a discussion of the 1993 film, Groundhog Day. If you had to relive one day of your life repeatedly, what would you do?
The discussion will take place on Monday, February 4th, from 4 to 5 p.m. in the CEE office at Rockford College. Light refreshments will be provided. All interested parties may attend.
Here are INDb’s and Wikipedia’s information pages for the movie.
Previously: Philosophy and Film Series: Blade Runner, Crimes and Misdemeanors.
Posted 3 months, 3 weeks ago at 2:42 pm. Add a comment
“Taneyev had come to Petersburg from Moscow to show his new symphony, and the host hid the young Glazunov in the next room. Taneyev played. When Taneyev finished and rose from the piano, he was surrounded by the guests, who congratulated him, naturally. After the obligatory compliments, the host suddenly said, ‘I’d like you to meet a talented young man. He’s also recently written a symphony.’ 
