The mis­cel­lany of the inter­tubes … my post on Mahler brought up a ping-back that led me to this good arti­cle on Mahler’s orches­tra­tion … quite often, the web is like high school, full of peo­ple who’s expe­ri­ence and think­ing are lim­ited, and since they can’t see beyond the walls of their own enclo­sure, they live in smug assur­ance of their own supe­rior taste and intel­lect. Exhibit the Nth, this boor from Toronto who feels Asian musi­cians have removed the ‘oomph’ that he expects from … The Mes­siah? Audi­ences like this are the ones who give clas­si­cal music a bad name … I am sym­pa­thetic to the sen­ti­ment at Pen­ti­mento, but I dis­agree with the root prob­lem. Cul­ture is not a zero-sum game, and there is noth­ing wrong with empha­siz­ing what is per­son­ally indige­nous: every­one could use Beethoven, but if Amer­i­cans truly cared about their cul­ture they would study Sun Ra. The prob­lem is that every­thing is a com­mod­ity, every­thing is a mar­ket, every­thing has a price and noth­ing has a value. One impor­tant polit­i­cal party wishes to dis­man­tle soci­ety and leave every­one on their own, so of course they don’t want to invest any money in edu­ca­tion, and the other is in thrall to the most mate­r­ial mea­sures of mechan­i­cal achieve­ment, which might be fine met­rics for robots but have noth­ing do with human­ity …  I was curi­ous about The New Inquiry after this mildly ridicu­lous New York Times arti­cle, and now I think that it demon­strates prob­lems with under­grad­u­ate edu­ca­tion at some of our more clubby uni­ver­si­ties … and I never tire (well, maybe I do), of won­der­ing why good musi­cians usu­ally have fine taste in books, while good writ­ers usu­ally have mediocre and behind-the-trends taste in music; Vam­pire Week­end? Death Cab for Cutie? At least there’s Murakami.