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DECOMPOSING MOZART
One of the many valuable aspects of MEDIUM is that it constitutes an opportunity to leisurely graze across many fields of topical subject matter, pausing here and there to chew contentedly on various things that often or not won’t quite digest as well as four ruminant stomachs (or even one) should enable them to be.
Very recently, in the course of perusing an article by one of our more astute gazetteers (Garrett Andrew Schneider), my progress down that particular pathway was unexpectedly arrested by a reference he made to another article that tripped me up as effectively as might an unseen bramble bush, lying low across the trail.
The specific thorny trip-wire in reference was a piece by Mark Vanhoenacker titled Requiem: Classical Music in America is Dead, appearing in an on-line journal called SLATE. In the short span of about 3 pages Vanhoenacker (a good Belgian name, if ever there was one) manages to insult a whole range of people, including the, er…ahem…’weight-challenged’, women, ‘old people’, ‘young people’, nerds, business entrepreneurs, and capitalists among us. That’s surely a breathtaking sampling!
Towards the end of his analysis, Mr. V (I’ll content myself with that identifier, given the unwieldy articulation of his Flemish surname) makes the remark that ‘classical music has been down so long, it must somehow be due for a comeback’. That tends to…
