tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3991721412361909265.post3834770497971800660..comments2024-03-27T14:01:25.896-04:00Comments on Daniel Stephen Johnson: TLS Review of Rosen and Taruskin Worst Thing EverDan Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02379073869436839786noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3991721412361909265.post-12547479943488030132009-07-29T17:55:47.752-04:002009-07-29T17:55:47.752-04:00What, you're leaving out the homophobic bits, ...What, you're leaving out the homophobic bits, the ones where Peter Williams compares Chaikovsky with Oscar Wile [sic]? Or how those who know to add two and two also know how to connect Chaikovsky with his Symphonie Pathetique (or something)?<br /><br />Oswald Mosley has more in common with Peter Williams than Oscar Wilde has with Chaikovsky.<br /><br />Bigotry aside, I'm not sure this review is uniquely awful for the TLS. The irreplaceable Andrew Porter aside, their stable of music reviewers is poor. Guy Dammann's review of the Aldeburgh Festival was prolix and muddled. <br /><br />http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25374-2656195,00.html<br /><br />And, speaking of Jew-baiting, Hugh Wood, in a generally foolish review of Elgar books last year, gave us this gem: "And Harper-Scott is still partly under the scared spell of that old turnip ghost Heinrich Schenker - who has so little to tell us about music, whose range of interest is limited and narrow, who is so prepared to miss out anything inconvenient to his diagrams, whose Ursatz, in fact, is so often Ersatz. The constant invocation of such authorities gives the whole proceeding a rabbinical air. This is not scholarship, but weird amusical pedantry..."<br /><br />One wonders how much Hugh Wood actually knows about rabbis.m. crochenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3991721412361909265.post-57928563563577625952009-07-29T17:33:22.940-04:002009-07-29T17:33:22.940-04:00Brilliant post, Dan. I’d still be laughing, if pon...Brilliant post, Dan. I’d still be laughing, if pondering the truths behind it were not so unpleasant. In fact, I’d extend the charge of anti-Semitism to something a little broader. <br /><br />Williams launches his comments on Taruskin with a potshot at the linguistic impurity of immigrant households. The tone is Victorian ("an upbringing in which Yiddish was spoken"). I recall, as a musicology graduate student in a now mostly-irrelevant Ivy League program decades ago, one of my peers sniffily referring to another as coming from a family that was “right off the boat.” The comment didn’t sit well with me, which is why I still remember it -- my own parents were born in the U.S. (by a couple of months), but neither spoke English at home until they entered grade school. Williams’s class-consciousness and racism is unfathomable to most American academics today, but I fear the same can’t be said of the British academy, which seems to believe it still “owns” our language and defines its etiquette. <br /><br />Sad that TLS would offer this assignment to someone whose advanced chronological age and antiquated positions can’t disguise the careless intellectual immaturity of an undergraduate.Unknownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12250221049683865179noreply@blogger.com