How are cherished art works of the past best served and most deeply savored? A visitor to the Basilica of San Francesco in Arezzo will find the remains and restoration of only what Piero della Francesco himself painted in the great 15th century frescoes. The restorer has removed all of the renderings of the many […]
Hoax or Howler? Musical Analysis in Huxley’s Point Counter Point Examined
Winter
Chapter 37 of Aldous Huxley’s 1928 novel Point Counter Point contains an often quoted description of the slow movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet in A minor, op.132. Like Thomas Mann’s lyrical passage on the final movement and final measures of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata, op.111, Huxley invokes Beethoven’s music as a metaphor for larger thematic issues […]
Elliot Carter’s Harmony Book and the Idea of Order
Fall
When I began to deal with the Piano Concerto and the Concerto for Orchestra, I kept finding that I was writing the same chord plans over and over again in order to find the relationship between them. And so I decided to write out something that was more or less permanent and organized so I […]
Vienna to Auschwitz A Biography of Alma Rosé
Winter
Instead of the whole, the consummated, of which I dreamed, I leave patchwork, the incomplete, as man is fated to do…I meant well and aimed at high goals. Not always could my efforts be crowned with success… But I have always given my all and have subordinated my person to the cause, my inclinations to […]