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Over at The American Scholar, Joseph Horowitz has asked the big question about art music in America: can it find an orientation, a future direction, a way forward? In truth, the question has loomed over our musical culture, unanswered, ever since the serialist revolution over a hundred years ago. Horowitz's telling highlights composers who resisted serialism, such as Busoni, Elgar, Sibelius, and Ives (we might widen the lens even further to include the likes of Debussy, Ravel, Delius, Hindemith, Scriabin, and Shostakovich). He also connects a few dots from Dvořák and his stay in America to composers who answered Dvořák's call to honor and integrate music from Native American cultures; a somewhat prominent example is Busoni's Indian Fantasy for piano and orchestra, whereas a more obscure but quite inspiring example is Arthur Farwell's "Hoka" String Quartet (which Horowitz names "the closest thing I know to an American idiom in parallel with Béla Bartók’s raw absorption of Transylvanian song and dance").
Conspicuously absent from Horowitz's analysis are composers working in or inspired by our African-American heritage. The list is long: William Grant Still, Florence Price, Harry Burleigh, William Levi Dawson; Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, Mary Lou Williams, James P. Johnson; Thelonius Monk, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane; Lennie Tristano, Dave Brubeck, Bill Evans, Gil Evans; and so many more. And how about that quintessential American Louis Armstrong, whom Albert Murray dubbed a "Promethean bringer of syncopated lightning from the Land of the Titans" (!): can we not see that his Hot Fives and Hot Sevens were the foundation for an American chamber music that flourishes to this day? Horowitz also mentions music that "composes itself": what of improvisational masters of free jazz like Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor, Pharoah Sanders, and the ever-amazing Keith Jarrett? With regard to the underrated Billy Strayhorn specifically, Walter van de Leur in his book Something to Live For shows that Strayhorn independently developed a harmonic and melodic language quite close to Bartók's axis system as described in Ernő Lendvai's book on Bartók's compositional methods. This huge tradition of distinctively American music offers an alternative path out of the wilderness of atonality and twelve-tone madness.
Is there potential for a 21st-century "Third Stream" integration that brings together many of these strands of American and European music? Only time will tell. The music of the future is still to be created...
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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Last week I had a brief conversation with two of my neighbors about politics and, specifically, my avoidance thereof. We touched on only the first of the topics I cover in this post, but I thought it might be helpful to me, and perhaps others, if I use this space to clarify my thoughts.
It's an unavoidable fact of life that politics happen. Yet individual citizens have essentially no influence over the course of governance, even though we have to live with the consequences. What's worse, through a kind of collective guilt we often feel somewhat responsible for (or aghast at) the actions of our political "leaders", despite the fact there's almost nothing we can do to change the situation. So I got to wondering: can I make the political personal but in a healthy way, as I've been working to personalize so much else?
As I've described before, I used to pay a lot of attention to political matters, I had opinions about various domains of government policy, I wrote letters to the editor, and I even participated in the occasional rally or attended the occasional city council or county commissioners' meeting. However, that simply raised my stress levels and didn't do anyone else any good, either. Slowly I realized that I have absolutely no influence in Washington D.C., Denver (the capital of Colorado), or even Castle Rock (our county seat). The main reason is that national, state, and even county governance is impersonal: I don't have relationships with the people involved and I don't particularly want to, because building such relationships would turn me into a more political person than I intend to be in life.
However, there is a place and community where I can and already do have such relationships, and that's my neighborhood of about 500 people. Since we moved here twelve years ago, I've served fairly regularly on our neighborhood association's board of directors, I've taken on management of our website, and last April I was selected to serve as the board president. Currently I'm also collaborating with the board presidents of two abutting neighborhoods to oppose a proposed urban-style development in our semi-rural area, which has entailed communicating with the planning department, attending planning commission meetings, and so forth. It's this very local level of political activity and community contribution where I can have a positive impact, so that's where I focus my energies.
The second topic is electoral politics, which for most people means voting (few of us are going to run for office, although earlier in life I contemplated it somewhat seriously and I helped out with a few campaigns). To put it bluntly: the act of voting might feel personally significant, but societally it is inconsequential. These days when everything is so politicized, the worst consequence of voting is offending friends and family; sadly, I've known several couples who nearly ruined their marriages of 20, 30, or 40 years over political disagreements, especially over the extremely divisive figure of Donald Trump.
Here too I've had a personalist realization: I don't know the people running for office. Yes, I might have impressions (often pretty strong impressions), but I don't know them. Leaving aside the well-known national personalities, how am I to make decisions about voting on candidates for, say, county commission or school board? I don't know if these people have good character, good judgment, and good intentions (the three primary factors underpinning the development of personal trust, as Aristotle outlined at Rhetoric 1378a8). Will they make well-reasoned, evidence-based decisions, avoid partisanship, have a strong ethic of public service, listen to the citizens, collaborate in an open-minded fashion with all the relevant stakeholders, not be corrupted by the power of their office, and so on? I have no idea, because I don't know these people. Consistent with Dunbar numbers, there are maybe 150 people in the whole country whom I know well enough to entrust with my vote, and they're not on the ballot!
What to do? Well, I've started simply leaving my ballots blank for all elected offices (I do still vote on initiatives and referendums). I refuse to have my politically somewhat dissonant voice be constrained by those little circles on the ballot and I won't be forced to vote for someone I don't know and trust merely in order to vote against someone else whom also I don't know and trust - especially because it is so easy for other folks to misconstrue that putative vote "for" as the kind of true endorsement that in all honestly I cannot provide.
This brings things back around to the first topic: I am trying to make a positive difference in the only way I know how, which is personally serving the community in my own neighborhood. Everything else in politics strikes me anyway as sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Naturally and as always, what works for me won't necessarily work for you...
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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In his essay "Of the Rewards of Honour", Montaigne discourses on the "vain and in themselves valueless distinctions to honour and recompense virtue" that governments have instituted over the centuries: crowns of laurel, special uniforms, privileged seating, names, titles, coats of arms, and the like. Most commonly, these rewards of honor are used to encourage military valor among the citizenry. Montaigne then goes on to say:
There is no virtue that so easily spreads as that of military valour. There is another virtue, true, perfect, and philosophical, of which I do not speak, and only make use of the word in our common acceptation, much greater than this and more full, which is a force and assurance of the soul, equally despising all sorts of adverse accidents, equable, uniform, and constant, of which ours [i.e., military valor] is no more than one little ray.
Because Montaigne declines to speak at length about this "other virtue" (at least here), we must guess at what it is.
First, I'll note one potential point of confusion. Above I quote from the old translation by Charles Cotton, first made in the 17th century. In Donald Frame's highly acclaimed translation from the 1950s, he renders "another virtue" as "another valor"; however, I don't see that in the French: Montaigne simply says "there is another" - il y en a une autre - which as far as I can tell refers to the generic class of virtue rather than to the specific virtue of valor.
As much as I like the suggestion of "philosophical valor" (which I suppose would be intellectual honesty scrupulously applied to oneself), the equanimity or self-possession at which Montaigne gestures here likely has a more prosaic source: the multifarious ancient Greek virtue of σωφροσύνη, typically rendered as moderation. Consider, for example, Book III of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics: after treating at length the topic of courage (which is the greatest human virtue in times of war), Aristotle immediately turns to the topic of moderation (which is, along with justice, the greatest human virtue in times of peace).
Here again Montaigne brings his insights to bear most directly on himself, in that he strives to cultivate inner peace, a certain detachment from the vicissitudes of life, and the kind of constancy that avoids becoming puffed up about successes or crestfallen about misfortunes. Not that this "force and assurance of the soul" is easy to achieve, mind you, but it has always been central to the normative ideal of the sage and to philosophy as a way of life.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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In Montaigne's essay "Use Makes Perfect" or "Of Practice", he recounts at some length a brush with death he experienced because of a horse-riding accident. He then offers some remarkable reflections on his practice of personalism:
This long story of so light an accident would appear vain enough, were it not for the knowledge I have gained by it for my own use; for I do really find, that to get acquainted with death, needs no more but nearly to approach it. Every one, as Pliny says, is a good doctrine to himself, provided he be capable of discovering himself near at hand. Here, this is not my doctrine, 'tis my study; and is not the lesson of another, but my own; and if I communicate it, it ought not to be ill taken, for that which is of use to me, may also, peradventure, be useful to another.... We hear but of two or three of the ancients, who have beaten this path, and yet I cannot say if it was after this manner, knowing no more of them but their names. No one since has followed the track: 'tis a rugged road, more so than it seems, to follow a pace so rambling and uncertain, as that of the soul; to penetrate the dark profundities of its intricate internal windings; to choose and lay hold of so many little nimble motions; 'tis a new and extraordinary undertaking, and that withdraws us from the common and most recommended employments of the world. 'Tis now many years since that my thoughts have had no other aim and level than myself, and that I have only pried into and studied myself: or, if I study any other thing, 'tis to apply it to or rather in myself.
Talk about making it personal! Here Montaigne demonstrates that he was one of the first to consistently resist the universalist temptation and put all insights to the test (French "essai") of usefulness to himself. Although I do wonder who his "two or three of the ancients" were, of whom we are left "knowing no more of them but their names" (presumably sages who penned no writings, such as Pyrrho or Diogenes), in the end that's unimportant: what matters is the personal practice of self-understanding and self-improvement. Notice Montaigne's observation that personalism is a more rugged road than universalism: it's easy to pontificate about what everyone should do, but much more difficult to find your own path. Indeed, since universalism is what everyone else is doing, it's one of "the common and most recommended employments of the world", in contrast to the "new and extraordinary undertaking" of personal soulcraft and providing an account of your own way of life.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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Following my tradition of posting on or about Public Domain Day, here is a brief report about this year's publishing activity at the Monadnock Valley Press, my website for writings in the public domain.
As expected, 2025 was a light year. The yield was limited to a few essays by Montaigne, George Santayana, and Randolph Bourne; the Histories of Herodotus; the Rhetoric of Aristotle; several dialogues by Xenophon; a lecture by A.E. Housman; a speech by Abraham Lincoln; one letter each by Thomas Jefferson and Mark Twain; one play each by Sophocles and Henrik Ibsen; an epic poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; Plutarch's Life of Alexander; and a fair number of poems.
On the plus side, since March we've been publishing the Classic Poems newsletter on Substack, whose motto is "A Poem a Day Keeps the Doldrums Away!"
In general the publication roadmap is backing up and it's not clear when I'll have the time and inclination to make faster progress. Not that anyone is pushing me to publish things in a hurry, mind you. That's the beauty of a long-term side project...
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In 2024 I read 95 books; although I didn't think I'd ever top that, in 2025 I somehow managed to read 116 books (more than two a week and almost ten a month). The downside is that for various reasons I didn't write my book on Aristotle, which I thought would absorb most of my energies. Instead I read a bunch of jazz biographies, historical tomes on American culture, some classic American literature, all the ancient Greek tragedies, philosophical treatments of various topics in ethics and aesthetics, and the usual smattering of poetry. Highlights were three original works of philosophy by Walter Kaufmann, three early novels by Willa Cather (my new favorite writer of fiction!), and wide-ranging explorations in music and aesthetics (especially Roger Scruton's Beauty, the collected nonfiction of Albert Murray, and Ellen Dissanayake's ethological analyses of art as a behavior in What Is Art For? and Homo Aestheticus).
What will 2026 bring? Because in the last few months I haven't been emotionally inclined to fiction (these things come and go with me), I expect I'll continue my research into music and aesthetics, which has been informing both my musical compositions and my reflections on artistic creation as a path to wisdom. I'm also excited to report that my best friend and I will soon start a pair reading of the Iliad and Odyssey in ancient Greek, which I'm expecting will be a time-consuming but richly-rewarding endeavor (no doubt focused initially on relearning Greek grammar and vocabulary as well as the subtleties of dactylic hexameter). The Homer project is highly relevant to the epic poem I'm slowly composing about Pyrrho and Alexander the Great, so I might also dive into my huge reading list of related works in history, philosophy, and poetics. Finally, for edification and amusement I'll yet again read the essays of Montaigne, since I've started on them recently with much enjoyment and see no reason to stop.
History
Literature
Music
Philosophy
Various
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