Not about, but on the occasion of: the complaint I made last year about the thing called "Holiday":

The American Christmas has always, or at least since the middle of the last century or so, had its secularized aspect. That was fine: we were a predominantly Christian country, but plenty of people who did not celebrate the religious holiday as such found much to enjoy in the cultural paraphernalia. Irving Berlin gave us "White Christmas," which no decent person could dislike or resent, and he was Jewish. Notice, though, that he didn't shy away from using the word "Christmas." From an early age I had a sense that something was missing when the decorations and greetings and such of the season left out any mention whatsoever of Christmas itself. And at a not so early, but not very late, age it occurred to me that "the holiday season" would lose the essence of its charm if the religious core of it were removed.

Well, that has pretty much happened now as far as public speech is concerned.

"Middle of the last century"? I must have meant to say the 19th. It certainly predated the middle of the 20th. But anyway:

The good part of this is that as I lose interest in Holiday I take more notice of Advent.

Which I'm currently doing. 

On the weekend of November 6, i.e. the weekend after the election, my wife and I made an overnight trip to my ancestral homeland of northern Alabama. It's a 5 1/2 hour drive at least, more if you make more than the minimal stops, so we usually listen to an audio book on the way up and back, trying to find one that will take most of the time but not go over it. This time it was the above-mentioned Josephine Tey novel, read by Carole Boyd. 

It's pretty rare for me that I recognize the name of the reader of an audio book, and the pattern held here. The quality of this one is so fine that I wanted to know more about the narrator, so as soon as I got home I looked her up. It turns out that Carole Boyd is a moderately successful actress (see Wikipedia), especially so at voice work.

Andrew McCarthy is an experienced and knowledgeable lawyer, and also a Trump supporter. He was the "yes" in that "yes-no-maybe" note about voting for Trump that I posted a few weeks ago. Like a lot of reasonable people, he thinks there are good grounds for believing that there was some cheating by the Democrats in this election. He thinks, for instance, that there could be as many as 10,000 questionable votes in Pennsylvania. But yet:

See, the president trails by 55,000 in Pennsylvania. It is anything but clear that all 10,000 late-arriving ballots are Biden votes — a goodly chunk of them could be Trump votes that the president would be knocking out. But even if we suspend disbelief and assume that they’re all Biden votes, the president would still be 45,000 short of flipping the state into his win column.

This is the president’s fatal problem. No matter which battleground state we analyze, there is always a mismatch between the impropriety alleged and the remedy that it could yield. Where Trump is strongest, as in the Supreme Court case, the yield in votes is a relative pittance. Where Trump’s claims are weaker and hotly disputed, the president is asking for mass disfranchisement, which no court is ever going to order.

(1) Those like the man who erected this sign, which is highly visible from I-65, a highway I travel often.

(2) Those who see the sign and are indignant and say "That's so stupid. Can you believe there are such idiots in the world? I'm embarrassed that I live in this state."

(3) Those who see it and laugh but say "Well, actually he has a point." 

Here, by the way, is some information on the man responsible for the sign.

I recall seeing it as long ago as the 1980s. A few years ago it disappeared and I was afraid that the forces of Godlessness had finally prevailed: someone had decided it was too divisive or something. But it had been blown down by a storm, and was eventually put back. 

Now that I think about it some more, though, and having read the second piece linked above, I see there are actually four types of people.

(4) Those who think it's crazy but like the fact that there is still some untamed eccentricity around. 

An angel came to me and said, "Ok, here's our best offer: Biden wins the presidency, and the Republicans keep the Senate."

I didn't have to think for very long. No more Trump craziness, from Trump himself, from his enemies, from his supporters. And the damage the Democrats can do will be severely limited.

"I'll take it," I said. 

"That's good," said the angel. "Because we weren't actually going to listen to you anyway.

I have a prejudice against ballet music. It's probably not uncommon: I call it a prejudice, but I could fairly maintain that it's a rational judgment. By its nature the music is episodic and tied to a story, or at least a series of scenes or tableaux, which are meant to be seen in conjunction with the music, and in fact are meant to be the main attraction. So if you're listening to the music alone you tend to get a group of little pieces that don't necessarily seem to be that well connected, and whose tie to the story is either limiting or vague or both. In any case it has to be supplied from outside.

I love The Rite of Spring and it's so intrinsically tied to its program that I can't imagine it being other than it is. But I wonder what I, and for that matter listeners in general, would think of it if it had just appeared as pure music with a neutral title like Concerto for Orchestra. I'm sure it would have still made a splash, but would  it have made the splash that it did, with the intentionally shocking primitivism of the ballet? Would it have been criticized as lacking unity? Impossible to know, obviously. I haven't heard it for some time, so I think I'll listen to it with that in mind.

But then if we're talking about a suite chosen from the ballet it's not really a fair criticism. A suite is by definition a set of distinct pieces, not a single coherent composition. I hear The Nutcracker Suite as a set of wonderful small works, and I love it. (I'm never sure about the officially correct name of the thing, and even less sure about how it should be italicized or quoted, but that's the way Wikipedia does it, so I'll go with that.)

Anyway: the next two LPs in the Fr. Dorrel collection, in the order in which they happen to sit on the shelf, are two volumes of Aaron Copland's music, three of them ballet scores, or suites taken from them.

Billy the Kid and Rodeo (The Utah Symphony conducted by Maurice Abravanel, Westminster WST 14059, 1959)

Both these pretty much fit, and are limited by, the remarks I made above. Both are pretty "sectioned" and I really like some of the sections, others not so much. The opening of Billy the Kid is great, that Copland wide-open-spaces sound which somehow has come to say "America." And the gunfight, which is mostly percussion, is certainly interesting. And I wonder how it would be taken if, as I suggested re The Rite above, it were extracted and presented with a bland title. In this case people might actually say that it sounds like a gunfight.

This recording also includes a bit from the ballet which apparently is not officially part of the suite. It's called "Billy's Waltz" and it's a simple, unpretentious, and lovely piece which deserves to be heard.

Rodeo...well, broadly speaking my view of it is much the same. I like some of it, mainly the quieter parts. It strikes me as a bit ersatz, maybe a touch patronizing, when it ventures into barn-dance territory, as is true of certain portions of the other ballet.

The recording doesn't strike me as great, either sonically or as a performance. But it certainly isn't bad, either. The sound really is pretty impressive for its time.

Appalachian Spring, El Salon Mexico, and Dance from Music for the Theatre (Bernstein, New York Philharmonic, Columbia MS 6355)

I love Appalachian Spring. If you don't know it, you should. It's my favorite Copland, which really isn't definitive because I don't know a lot of his work. But if I were to hear every note of it, I have a feeling that Appalachian Spring would retain its position.

About this recording I'm somewhat ambivalent. The sound is terrific, noticeably better than that of the Westminster disk, even though it was recorded only a few years later, in 1962. I can't fault the performance, which is crisp and precise and energetic, flawless but not slick, with striking dynamics. But those dynamics are a bit too striking for my taste and the level of energy borders on the aggressive. The loud entry of the strings in the second section, after the gentle introduction, is jarring to me.

But my reservation is at least in part the result of prejudice in favor of another recording: the full ballet in the original instrumentation, conducted by the composer.

Bernstein's recording is a beauty, but this one is the sweet shy quietly pretty girl whom you didn't notice at first but who steals your heart when you do. The original instrumentation is only thirteen instruments: flute, clarinet, bassoon, piano, and a set of strings--that was all the theater had room for. This is also the original score, roughly a third longer than the suite. Copland says that the only change he made for the suite "was to cut a few spots that were needed only for choreographic purposes." I haven't tried to figure out what was cut, but I think the extra length is part of the reason that this recording has a more leisurely quality. But aside from that, the chamber orchestra makes it an altogether gentler, sweeter, more intimate piece of music, and for me more moving. And I think it's more appropriate to the low-key story line of the ballet, which depicts a wedding. 

I hadn't heard this LP for many years, so I got it out to see if my old affection still held. It does. Maybe it's only because this is the recording by which I first got acquainted with the piece, but in any case I prefer it. Looking around the web I get the impression that it isn't in print as I originally bought it in the 1970s (Columbia M32736, pictured above). But I'm pretty sure it's available in some form, as I see several "Copland Conducts Copland" collections. The same no doubt is true of the Bernstein recording. 

The most well-known part of the ballet is the use of the tune "Simple Gifts," which Catholics and others are accustomed to hearing as "The Lord of the Dance." I have always disliked that song for some reason and am relieved to find that it hasn't hurt my enjoyment of Copland's music. 

Copland says that El Salon Mexico is "the Mexico of the tourists," not "the more profound side of Mexico," which "would have been foolish for me to attempt to translate into musical sounds." Fair enough. It's a short (under eleven minutes), lively, colorful piece: nothing deep, but I find it hard to imagine anyone not enjoying it.

The Dance from Music for the Theatre is only a few minutes long and ends with a sort of near-iambic pair of beats--'DaDUM"--which in my mind immediately turned into "So what?" I had no reaction worth remarking upon to the piece. The liner notes say that the work as a whole "was not intended for the theatre, but rather as a commentary upon it." I'll give it another chance some time.

As you probably know, while Copland's music is thought of as being deeply connected to the American landscape, especially of the West, and to rural or rustic life, he was a Jewish homosexual from New York.

I've known that for a long time. What I did not know until I looked him up on Wikipedia a few days ago was that William "Billy the Kid" Bonney, whose real name was actually not William or Billy but Henry McCarty, was also a native of New York City. Ain't that America?

Just a note to say that in an effort to get control of the amount of time I spend online, and to focus on some writing I'm trying to do, I'm making it a rule for myself to stay off the net until noon every day. So I won't see comments made in the morning until the afternoon. 

Somewhere or other, sometime or other, I read that G.K. Chesterton, asked whether he was a liberal, answered that he was "the only liberal." I sometimes feel that way. I long ago acquiesced to the fact that in the American political context I'm more or less correctly classified as a conservative. But as the so-common-as-to-be-hackneyed followup to any such statement goes, what American conservatism seeks to conserve is in large part classical liberalism.

It probably doesn't need saying to people who read this blog, but in case it does: "classical liberalism" refers not to what we currently refer to as the liberal faction in contemporary politics, but to a political philosophy which is, in a nutshell, that of the United States of America. Most discussions of it emphasize its economic aspects, which I'm sure is accurate, but I'm not a political philosopher or economist and am not very interested in wrangling over the definition. For my purposes it's the political system described by the Constitution, and a corresponding culture which values self-government, liberty, the rule of law, reason, the free exchange of ideas, religious tolerance, and so on--the whole list of things which until recently were generally agreed upon, all based on what were considered in the 18th century self-evident truths about human nature. The American constitution puts that basic worldview into a system of government, and so I prefer the term "constitutional liberalism." (Also "classical liberalism" has other associations, with capitalism for instance, which I want to avoid--but that's another topic.)