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We Smoked the Last One an Hour Ago #4 -- TE Hulme and Frank Brickle

9 April 2026
This is mostly aimed at topical connections to some questions the arise from TE Hulme’s essay, “A Tory Philosophy” – –can humans change? –whither *the identity of man*? These became right wing pieties to push back …
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We Smoked the Last One and Hours Ago #3 -- Joni Mitchell, David Lang, & Harold Meltzer

26 March 2026
I’m jotting down thoghts for my next talk at the Berlin Academy of American Music’s Composers Workshop, June 29 to July 5. Without thinking, often even without overthinking, US music stays with what works. Those working in an uptown head …
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Emil Awad on Schoenberg/Babbitt Hexachordal poetics

14 March 2026
Mario Davidovsky was an honored guest at FICA21, a new music festival and seminar at the Universiad Veracruzana. He later convinced FICA212’s founder and Director Emil Awad to bring me to Xalapa 15 or 20 years ago. Emil Awad finished high school …
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We Smoked the Last One an Hour Ago #2 -- Max Beerbohm

5 March 2026
What ails thee, uncle? Don’t ask AI about political qauestions, but about other things, AI can be charming. Here, my reading of Beerbohm was already largely in accord with the agglomerator’s. I just like the leg up because I don’t …
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Ideas of Order in Key Western Musical Works

24 February 2026
Froberger & Buxtehude to Bach Bach clearly admired the bizarre in the works of Buxtehude and Froberger, and he composed all his own craziness into his revolutionary cosmic order wherein details of the A section that the work of modulating to V are …
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We Smoked the Last One an Hour Ago #1

23 February 2026
“Toss me a cigarette. I think there’s one in my rainoat.” “We smoked the last one an hour ago” (from Paul Simon’s “America”) Hats off to the few of Americans who know what they want. Most often we belong …
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Simeon ten Holt's Canto Ostinato

23 February 2026
Image–pianist Kees Wieringa, Simeon ten Holt’s great champion. Kees Wieringa’s Simeon ten Holt Playlist Kees Wierinng, at the YXIE Festival in Villebelevin, 2024, organized a performance a performance of ten Holt’s Canto …
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Shadows

20 February 2026
In diatonic music, the complement, the tritone transposition of the diatonic hexachord, emerges as the shadow, the unconscious of the diatonic hexachord that is held, that *governs* the surface. This is now an ancient 20th Century habit of thinking. No, …
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