James Agee was a major influence on Cormac McCarthy who at one point even scavenged some bricks from Agee's childhood home just west of downtown Knoxville to build his own fireplace.
Well, I don't think Jack's audience will give me any grief over it. But if I were lecturing at Brown, I'd have to give a Trigger Warning, because here and there in his writings, Agee did use the N Word.
But hey, Richard Strauss signed off his personal correspondence with a jaunty "Heil Hitler," yet his works are concert-hall staples in the US (and just about everywhere else but Israel). So everybody calm down about Agee.
Heifetz tried to play Strauss' violin sonata in Israel, and a lunatic tried to break his violin with an iron pipe, and Heifetz instinctively tried to protect his violin, and the pipe hit his bow arm.
The take-away: If anybody does not know Samuel Barber's Agee setting "Knoxville, Summer of 1915," please give it a thoughtful listen. There's so much pain there!!! So now, I will pray for the Repose of Agee's Soul.
As for his attacker, he was never identified so it's hard to say if he was a lunatic or not. This was in 1953, less than 10 after the end of WWII and the wounds were still pretty raw. Audiences greeted his playing Strauss with silence. The attack didn't take place during a performance but rather when Heifitz was entering his hotel.
The way I look at it, the western canon of classical music is so vast that I don't have to force myself to listen to Strauss or Wagner, men who would have hated me because of the circumstances of my birth.
John, Have you ever listened to Tradition, the album of Jewish standards Itzak Perlman recorded with the Israel Philharmonic? Any album that starts with My Yiddishe Mama is going to be a bit schmaltzy but you can hear the IPO having great fun.
Mr. Perlman is not my fave rave violinist. Strangely enough, I thought that the conventional ranking of, "First Perlman, then Zukerman," should have been in reverse order. Zukerman's first recording of Elgar's violin concerto, Barenboim conducting, is monumental. Just to prove that you don't have to be a beleaguered Catholic, to "get" Elgar.
Nothing wrong with preferring Zuckerman to Perlman. I think that Eddie Van Halen was a superb technical guitar player, the most influential of his generation. Jeff Beck, however, was a musician (and from the stories I've heard, much more of a mensch).
It strikes me that the majesty of the Mass, from which so much of this beautiful music derives, does very much depend on that feature most despised by restless moderns: rote repetition. This historical puzzle (at least for us moderns) can be unlocked when one recalls that for most of Christian history, every Mass included in sizable, perhaps a majority of illiterate people. They couldn't just go home and read their own Bible, in good Protestant fashion; because they couldn't read at all. So the Liturgy just was their hearing and receiving the Word of God.
In light of that, repetition, far from a stale and dreary thing, erects itself into a shining and glorious thing. It is St. Peter answering Christ's post-Resurrection challenge: "feed my sheep."
By the way, this also gives us the true meaning of "apocryphal." The apocryphal texts are not "secret" or "hidden," much less "discredited" or "false"; the Greek word simply refers to those texts not read public, in other words, not read during the liturgy. The Book of Jubilees or 1 Enoch or the Ascension of Isaiah -- these are edifying texts, but ones to be read privately by those properly-equipped to interpret them.
I know we ridicule on the French nowadays, but the Franks accomplished a lot back then. Same goes with the Vikings and their now descendants the Scandinavians…
What a wonderful post from John Marks! Just one more example of the extraordinary reader base of Avoidable Contact Forever (I am the exception the proves the rule!). I felt like I just sat through a graduate level course in music appreciation. Thank you for taking the time to post such an informative piece.
I love learning and I love teaching, which, when you get right down to it, is merely Sharing. For 26 years I was a Visiting Lecturer at Thomas More College in New Hampshire. I also organized and presented the Chamber Music Performing Arts Series. So, it was an UNDERgraduate-level seminar you just sat in on.
Please, if you have not yet seen them, look at my piece on why String Quartets remain culturally important:
Plainchant would not have been necessary had the ecclesiastic authorities not insisted on keeping the Mass in a language nobody could understand, because it made it easier to maintain unchallenged authority.
Religion is at its worst when it does that. The focus shifts entirely from God's authority to earthly hierarchy. The ongoing tendency to do that is why I am not and never could be a Catholic, and also why I think conservative Catholics who prefer the Latin Mass are playing with fire to some extent.
Religious text should be open to inquiry. Religion by its nature requires faith, and a God who wants us to be faithful also wants us to understand the basis for that faith. Both the local language and, for the sake of history and study, all of the predecessor languages should be available.
What does all this have to do with music? Well, when people don't have to concentrate just on memorizing a text in a language they don't know, they can develop complex polyphony that carries the text to a completely different level. A chanted Mass is a moving thing, but can it really compete with something like the Mozart C major Mass or the Bruckner D minor Mass?
'also why I think conservative Catholics who prefer the Latin Mass are playing with fire to some extent.'
You're not wrong. The Latin Mass really shone in the brief, Venerable-Bede-sparrow-through-the-king's-hall moment of the 20th century when a major percentage of the educated middle class had enough Latin to understand it. Were it to be reinstated now, it would be as sounding brass or tinkling cymbal, so to speak.
Thanks Martel and Charlemagne! The first and last three videos are great, it's such pure/un-adulterated music that I wish I could have more time to explore, but the CURRENT YEAR continues to eat up my mental bandwidth. I usually don't read these posts but this one was very enjoyable.
I truly enjoy your posts. As I become an old man I find myself lacking the motivation to read about topics I am so completely unfamiliar with as the ones your write about.
The brevity and accessibility with which your write about your topics makes learning something so foreign very enjoyable.
There must be something in my eyes. Thanks. There's still something in my eyes.
Brian Eno and I share the Catholic Saint's Day (May 15) Name Saint of St. Jean-le-Baptiste de la Salle, the patron saint of teachers, especially the teachers of impoverished children.
De la Salle came from an upper-class family that was related to the Moet Champagne business (!!!). He spent all his money caring for and educating poor children, and his death was hastened by his voluntary impoverishment and hunger. The contrast to the public figures of the last few centuries and especially today (with some shining exceptions) should be obvious.
After I gave a lecture once, the Head of Library Services of Roger Williams University came up to me and said, "You are a natural-born teacher."
In real life I am somewhat shy and introverted, and I was so tongue-tied that could hardly say Thank You to him.
But here, I can explain.
Thank you.
And--the composers and the performers thank you.
BTW, Morten Lauridsen,, composer of the Agee setting, dedicated his only work for string quartet... to me.
Ya see, the deal was, I promised to never play the violin for Morten... and he was SO grateful.
Hi. I recorded a mini-lecture at Thomas More College, introducing Peter Sykes, who played the Goldbergs on a harpsichord tuned to the Bach-Spiral Temperament. It was right before the recital, whereas my longer lectures often were in the afternoons before dinner. So I only spoke about the music for about 10 minutes, but before that, I told a long and winding Musicological Dad Joke. The kids loved it.
I just emailed an mp3 to Jack. Jack can either email it to you, or embed the mp3 at the bottom of the article.
You had me at Martel!
The original MC Hammer!
That would be Yehuda HaMaccabee. Makav is Hebrew for Hammer.
well that was an enlightening post
the inspiration reaches incredibly far back it seems
curious to see what part 2 holds
James Agee was a major influence on Cormac McCarthy who at one point even scavenged some bricks from Agee's childhood home just west of downtown Knoxville to build his own fireplace.
Well, I don't think Jack's audience will give me any grief over it. But if I were lecturing at Brown, I'd have to give a Trigger Warning, because here and there in his writings, Agee did use the N Word.
But hey, Richard Strauss signed off his personal correspondence with a jaunty "Heil Hitler," yet his works are concert-hall staples in the US (and just about everywhere else but Israel). So everybody calm down about Agee.
Heifetz tried to play Strauss' violin sonata in Israel, and a lunatic tried to break his violin with an iron pipe, and Heifetz instinctively tried to protect his violin, and the pipe hit his bow arm.
The take-away: If anybody does not know Samuel Barber's Agee setting "Knoxville, Summer of 1915," please give it a thoughtful listen. There's so much pain there!!! So now, I will pray for the Repose of Agee's Soul.
https://songofamerica.net/song/knoxville-summer-of-1915-op-24/
john
I'm triggered because there's no trigger warning, John.
Nice writeup. Glad to see more from you on ACF.
I'm partial to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men so yeah, I'm acquainted.
Heifitz got off easy compared to Dimebag Darrell.
As for his attacker, he was never identified so it's hard to say if he was a lunatic or not. This was in 1953, less than 10 after the end of WWII and the wounds were still pretty raw. Audiences greeted his playing Strauss with silence. The attack didn't take place during a performance but rather when Heifitz was entering his hotel.
The way I look at it, the western canon of classical music is so vast that I don't have to force myself to listen to Strauss or Wagner, men who would have hated me because of the circumstances of my birth.
Well, just think what could have happened to Dimebag, if he had tried performing Wagner's Wesendonck Lieder in 1950s Israel!
The mind shudders.
john
John, Have you ever listened to Tradition, the album of Jewish standards Itzak Perlman recorded with the Israel Philharmonic? Any album that starts with My Yiddishe Mama is going to be a bit schmaltzy but you can hear the IPO having great fun.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5pwFfKDVzU&list=OLAK5uy_n-Kmh7v82SOKHnumsBwyf0YEAMP5oUvSA
Sorry, no.
I will give it a listen.
Mr. Perlman is not my fave rave violinist. Strangely enough, I thought that the conventional ranking of, "First Perlman, then Zukerman," should have been in reverse order. Zukerman's first recording of Elgar's violin concerto, Barenboim conducting, is monumental. Just to prove that you don't have to be a beleaguered Catholic, to "get" Elgar.
john
Nothing wrong with preferring Zuckerman to Perlman. I think that Eddie Van Halen was a superb technical guitar player, the most influential of his generation. Jeff Beck, however, was a musician (and from the stories I've heard, much more of a mensch).
Imagine how a 1953 audience would react to Marshall stacks, feedback, and synths.
Obligatory "We play both kinds, Country, and Western!"
The most quoted movie in my repertoire of movie quotes
From which I've dubbed Jack's homestead as "Baruth's Country Bunker".
Amazing. Thank you, sir.
It strikes me that the majesty of the Mass, from which so much of this beautiful music derives, does very much depend on that feature most despised by restless moderns: rote repetition. This historical puzzle (at least for us moderns) can be unlocked when one recalls that for most of Christian history, every Mass included in sizable, perhaps a majority of illiterate people. They couldn't just go home and read their own Bible, in good Protestant fashion; because they couldn't read at all. So the Liturgy just was their hearing and receiving the Word of God.
In light of that, repetition, far from a stale and dreary thing, erects itself into a shining and glorious thing. It is St. Peter answering Christ's post-Resurrection challenge: "feed my sheep."
By the way, this also gives us the true meaning of "apocryphal." The apocryphal texts are not "secret" or "hidden," much less "discredited" or "false"; the Greek word simply refers to those texts not read public, in other words, not read during the liturgy. The Book of Jubilees or 1 Enoch or the Ascension of Isaiah -- these are edifying texts, but ones to be read privately by those properly-equipped to interpret them.
Thank you.
john
I know we ridicule on the French nowadays, but the Franks accomplished a lot back then. Same goes with the Vikings and their now descendants the Scandinavians…
Thanks!
But, technically, the Franks were a Germanic tribe. Charlemagne's throne was in Aachen. Which later was one of the bloodiest WWII battles.
john
What a wonderful post from John Marks! Just one more example of the extraordinary reader base of Avoidable Contact Forever (I am the exception the proves the rule!). I felt like I just sat through a graduate level course in music appreciation. Thank you for taking the time to post such an informative piece.
Thank you.
I love learning and I love teaching, which, when you get right down to it, is merely Sharing. For 26 years I was a Visiting Lecturer at Thomas More College in New Hampshire. I also organized and presented the Chamber Music Performing Arts Series. So, it was an UNDERgraduate-level seminar you just sat in on.
Please, if you have not yet seen them, look at my piece on why String Quartets remain culturally important:
https://www.avoidablecontact.com/p/the-persisting-significance-of-the
And, my five-part series about choosing demo tracks to help evaluate stereo equipment.
The last one starts with links to the four previous installments.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-144604477
ciao,
john
Plainchant would not have been necessary had the ecclesiastic authorities not insisted on keeping the Mass in a language nobody could understand, because it made it easier to maintain unchallenged authority.
Religion is at its worst when it does that. The focus shifts entirely from God's authority to earthly hierarchy. The ongoing tendency to do that is why I am not and never could be a Catholic, and also why I think conservative Catholics who prefer the Latin Mass are playing with fire to some extent.
Religious text should be open to inquiry. Religion by its nature requires faith, and a God who wants us to be faithful also wants us to understand the basis for that faith. Both the local language and, for the sake of history and study, all of the predecessor languages should be available.
What does all this have to do with music? Well, when people don't have to concentrate just on memorizing a text in a language they don't know, they can develop complex polyphony that carries the text to a completely different level. A chanted Mass is a moving thing, but can it really compete with something like the Mozart C major Mass or the Bruckner D minor Mass?
'also why I think conservative Catholics who prefer the Latin Mass are playing with fire to some extent.'
You're not wrong. The Latin Mass really shone in the brief, Venerable-Bede-sparrow-through-the-king's-hall moment of the 20th century when a major percentage of the educated middle class had enough Latin to understand it. Were it to be reinstated now, it would be as sounding brass or tinkling cymbal, so to speak.
Yup—noisy gong or clanging cymbal.
Whenever I am taking customer info and they are a family of Martels, I reflexively utter "ah, The Hammer"
I am almost invariably met with blank stares, but every once in a while it is worth it.
Thanks Martel and Charlemagne! The first and last three videos are great, it's such pure/un-adulterated music that I wish I could have more time to explore, but the CURRENT YEAR continues to eat up my mental bandwidth. I usually don't read these posts but this one was very enjoyable.
I truly enjoy your posts. As I become an old man I find myself lacking the motivation to read about topics I am so completely unfamiliar with as the ones your write about.
The brevity and accessibility with which your write about your topics makes learning something so foreign very enjoyable.
There must be something in my eyes. Thanks. There's still something in my eyes.
Brian Eno and I share the Catholic Saint's Day (May 15) Name Saint of St. Jean-le-Baptiste de la Salle, the patron saint of teachers, especially the teachers of impoverished children.
De la Salle came from an upper-class family that was related to the Moet Champagne business (!!!). He spent all his money caring for and educating poor children, and his death was hastened by his voluntary impoverishment and hunger. The contrast to the public figures of the last few centuries and especially today (with some shining exceptions) should be obvious.
After I gave a lecture once, the Head of Library Services of Roger Williams University came up to me and said, "You are a natural-born teacher."
In real life I am somewhat shy and introverted, and I was so tongue-tied that could hardly say Thank You to him.
But here, I can explain.
Thank you.
And--the composers and the performers thank you.
BTW, Morten Lauridsen,, composer of the Agee setting, dedicated his only work for string quartet... to me.
Ya see, the deal was, I promised to never play the violin for Morten... and he was SO grateful.
#humblebrag.
Well, maybe that is an after-the fact backstory.
john
John another educational, well written work. Thanks for your contribution to the discussion.
Just to echo everyone else, thanks for your posts. Ever record any of your lectures?
Hi. I recorded a mini-lecture at Thomas More College, introducing Peter Sykes, who played the Goldbergs on a harpsichord tuned to the Bach-Spiral Temperament. It was right before the recital, whereas my longer lectures often were in the afternoons before dinner. So I only spoke about the music for about 10 minutes, but before that, I told a long and winding Musicological Dad Joke. The kids loved it.
I just emailed an mp3 to Jack. Jack can either email it to you, or embed the mp3 at the bottom of the article.
Such a wide variety of subjects on this ‘Stack! Bravo John and..Jack!
Thank you for your insightful post!
Just brilliant, John. I have been saving this up for a suitable moment...and it didn't disappoint!
Thank you! Part 2 is in the hopper and ready to go. It's going to be a rip-snorter.
I call King David of Israel and Judah a "Puddle-Jumping Mo-fo." And that is just for starters.
As soon as Part 2 hits the street, I will don, not my "Gay Apparel" (as the Christmas Carol notes), but rather my Asbestos Undies.
all my best,
john