Blog
24 August 2026
The Death of Tragedy
My readings of Stifter and Jean Paul, my hearings of Brahms and Schumann, these clashed last night with Schiller’s essays on tragedy, the sublime, and the pathetic. The death of tragedy fell quickly out of that …
22 August 2026
“It follows from the lawless, capricious spirit of the present age, which would egotistically annihilate the world and the universe in order to clear a space merely for free play in the void, and which tears off at the bandage of its wounds as a …
20 August 2026
image: Geog Joseph Vogler, who began speaking of *Mehrdeutigkeit*. Gottfried Weber developed the principles much further.
“It follows from the lawless, capricious spirit of the present age, which would egotistically annihilate the world and the …
1 August 2026
What Happened to the Cult of the Small?
or
Who Cares if You Sell Magazines?
Wm. Kentner Anderson
There remains a cult of the small in the US, and its predicament is a limpid encapsulation of the pathologies or our time, the pathologies of the …
30 June 2026
Holding and Letting Go
Chapter 1 of The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996) opens by inviting the reader to imagine a world where the Left had suffered a crippling political defeat. Eagleton’s argument is that postmodernism’s signature moves …
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 …
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 …
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 …
