Letters to the Editor
rupert_c
Published Letters: 1213 Editor's Choice: 12
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@Knox Bronson
[Read the article: Their terrifying sounds]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"This is symptomatic of a fundamental dishonesty at work in the world of the so-called avant garde and the academic, partly intellectual, partly spiritual ... it has not progressed anywhere in fifty years. Not because it is a dead-end street, but because it is a stop sign. No heart, no balls, no love ... it is art about the artist."
So you prefer art that is about a dead artist who was avant-garde and cutting edge 200 years ago?
Yep, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin and Hadyn and all the rest should have just keep composing baroque music adhereing to the already established and respectable forms.
Joshua Rifkin's Baroque Beatles Book did a splendid job of crafting Beatles songs into perfect and charming baroque masterworks. How would the Fifth work out as a concerto grosso?
But why not just scrap all that irritating and difficult music and just go back to plainchant. It was that troublesome Hildegard von Bingen who set us down this path of avant-garde atonal and difficult music when she decided that the pedestrian chant needed some intervals greater than a third and incorporated astounding leaps and soaring melodies which just is really too much for our delicate ears to bear. My brain hurts just thinking about it.
Yes, I say we blame it all on Hildegard and go back to plainchant because really, jumping from one note to another by no more that than a reasonable interval of a couple of half steps is liable to drive people insane. Speaking of insanity, she also invented opera. I rest my case against the Saintly Abbess.
Polyphony? Get that crap outa here! Why do you think they call it PEROTINITIS? Pick a note and stick with it! If you cannot sing the note, don't sing one an octave above or below, nor one a fifth above or below, just don't sing until there is a note that you can hit without offended us.
Adam de Halle? How dare he corrupt music with a silly love story. That just leads to MUSICAL THEATRE! Excuse me why I attempt to regain my composure, but I think I may be getting ill.
Isorhythyms? That just leads to syncopation and JAZZ! Throw that bounder Phillip de Vitry out of the music history books!
Guilliam Machaut? Why the hell would anyone want to write a piece of music that you could play backwards and it would sound the same? INSANE! Throw the bum out! The nerve of that elitist snob! He probably had an astrolabe!!!
And just when did we cross the line into the avant-garde territories outside of perfect trinary and holy rhythyms (:1,2:2,1:3,1,2:3,2,1: etc.)? Wasn't that in the RENAISSANCE??? Did it start in the CHURCH or the DANCE HALLS and BARS? Well, I got started on a Mr. Praetorius and you know where THAT leads too, Don't you? Rock and Roll, drum kits and DISCO!!! Michael Praetorius, OUT OF GROVES! STAT!!!
(that famous Bouree and Gavotte were the first classical pieces I learned - OH THE SHAME! Yes, that is how I started out and within a few short years I was playing Donna Summer's "Hot Stuff")
What about all those Masses in 4/4 or 2/4 - and they did it in CHURCH no less! It's pure deviltry I tell you.
Don't let me get started about the well tempered scale - it makes my blood BOIL! It's not only UNNATURAL, it's UNPYTHAGORIAN! The math just doesn't work, the ratios are off and the whole universe cries and weeps tears everytime you play a well-tempered chord on a keyboard. If you can tolerate a well-tempered scale, you might as well be tone deaf.
CHORDS!!! The ruination of our ears, how can you stand the confusion of figuring out what the root is? So many harmonics and fundamentals! 7ths, 6ths, Dims, Augs, 9ths - it is shear lunacy! If it's dimninished, DON'T PLAY IT! If it's augmented, IT'S TOO DAMN MUCH!
TRILLS and ORNAMENTS!!! Who is kidding whom? When you hit the wrong note it is the wrong note no matter how you try to cover the mistake by pretending that you are just being fancy.
All of these dastardly rule breakers and avant-garde types are making me really mad. I'd like to go on, but I think I need to let my head asplode now.
/head asplodes
See what happens when the teach music history in schools?
We won't let that ever happen again.
Sine waves, that is it, we should just use sine waves and no more than one at a time and a knob should be used to transpose the frequency and only one whole step of half step at a time and a frequency counter must be used in conjunction with a pythagorian scale plotted out on a spreadsheet to be used as reference whenever someone plays music. I have the C code for that somewhere at home, but it was written for an Atari computer. I think that will solve everything, if we can only find an Atari computer with a C compiler.
There, I feel so much better now. Don't you?
/sound of a sine wave at 261.626 HZ.
What? You gotta problem with 261.626 HZ? Pistols at dawn!!!
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Fat people spoiled everything!!!
[Read the article: How Oprah ruined the marathon]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]There is one thing that running races is supposed to teach us - there is only one winner and everyone else in the race is a loser.
How dare fat and out of shape people take that away from the winners?
The nerve of that Oprah Winfrey stealing all the glory that should belong to one person and one person alone.
My heart bleeds peanut butter.
How about a Marathon on Segways? That would be way cool.