Letters to the Editor
Sandy Yago
Published Letters: 122 Editor's Choice: 3
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Music but not song
[Read the article: Their terrifying sounds]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]In the history of Western symphonic music, following the Baroque, there begins the exponential enterprise of dismantling the rules of the counterpoint. It had been an exciting journey and the folks of the 18th and 19th centuries rewarded it with their enthusiastic attention. But by the beginning of the 20th century there was nothing left but to decouple symphonic music from the song.
Composers such as Ligeti, Xenakis, Carter or Schoenberg created things called music but it is called music only because there are sounds and instruments involved but it is not music as music has been understood by all preceding cultures during all preceding times.
There is no tonality, melody, rhythm, structure with a beginning, middle and end, there is nothing to SING. There is nothing to sing TO either.
I spent many hours listening to such music, knowing that it is the music of the times, but finally i realized: I JUST DON'T LIKE IT.
Bartok is "saved" from this fate by the fact that his music is based on folk songs. In fact sometimes he is looked down upon by the purists of modern music for not being entirely incomprehensible (sarcastic grin here).
Cage is "saved" by his involvement with the avantgard movement of the mid 20s century which on "the other end" was seamlessly linked with the contemporary pop culture. It is impossible to listen to Cage without seeing his tongue in his cheek.
Heck, even I saw him in the late 1980s in a small playhouse in NYC's Lower East Side, playing his prepared pianos in front of a small but enthusiastic crowd. And anyone can hear his piece entitled 4:33, by putting in earplugs and crawling under a thick bed cover.
Symphonic music has run its course and it is now dead. In search of originality, its practitioners have dismantled its own building blocks so profoundly that nothing is left, except the concept of the sound so unbound that it is now completely meaningless to society.
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Next!
[Read the article: How Oprah ruined the marathon]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]hghsgfahsdfgkahsfgkh ckjhzgc zhjvaskfh casfhsjk fh
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There are too many animals
[Read the article: Give Newt a chance]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Clearly, animals breath in clear oxygen and just to proceed with their usual activities of eating each other alive, and fuckin and stuff, they breath out pollutants such as carbon dioxide and farton polystinkite.
This is an untenable situation, as the Earth has now started to warm up, and in my opinion, all animals should be killed.
This, as a laudable byproduct, would also promote vegetarianism.
Thank you for your attention.
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Here, there, pandas and people everywhere
[Read the article: The evolution of creationism]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]First of all, reflecting to the last sentence of the article: "And generations of students will continue to grow up ignorant of basic scientific realities" - well, we don't need hordes of rabid theists to accomplish it, it's been made to happen for decades by the teachers themselves.
But that's neither here nor there.
... Okay ... Where is it, then? Everywhere? What does that mean, anyway?
... To lead a better life, I need my love to be here...
tra-la-la...
But onto songs of pandas and people.
It is such a logical proposition, that everything that exists must have been created, right? I mean, really. Only things that have been existing forever, have no creators, because they have no creation, given that there was no time to create them - they have existed forever! Hence the eternal regression argument against god is debunked. BUT: Before the hammer there is the no-hammer and the only way no-hammer turns into hammer if hammer is created by hammer maker. The same way the dog is created by the dog maker, the world is created by the world maker. Damned be you if you can't see the logic here!
Now, the question remains, why in god's sweet name would a creator create anything?
The current state of affairs regarding this enigma is the existence of the no-answer and no answer creator has been created as of yet to turn no-answer into answer.
Are you still with me?
But what we do know even now that whatever was created is fairly fucked up. For instance, there is cancer. Lou Gehrig's disease. Rapists and mass murderers. And that is just for us people, let's not forget the animal kingdom where hyenas start eating gazelles while they are still alive or more general invonveniences such as the Permian-Triassic catastrophe that killed 95 percent of all species, so give and take a few trillion individual living creatures died horrific deaths.
So if a god creates something, why does [insert pronoun here] create it to be like this? Where is that famed goodness here? Where is the intelligence?
Let me illuminate my rhetorical question with an example.
Say, you are a computer programmer and you create a World. Into that World you create People and you program them to be able to perceive and interpret the World and make decisions, and to suffer. You watch them multiply and fight and do the survival stuff and you may say, well, it is what it is, let the better win, who cares about gore and blood and tears. But when they begin to cut off the foreskin of their young thinking that it will somehow please you, then you should realize that there is something fundamentally wrong with your program and you'd better press that escape button.