The composer would probably object to this since though we own multiple copies of his anthem, he didn’t provide a bulletin insert so this is technically a copyright violation.

My opinion of Hurd was lowered after an email exchange in which I politely asked him if I could adapt one of his chorale preludes to my instrument’s limited range. He declined and suggested I do a different piece.

I did so but with a bad taste in my mouth. Fuck these guys.

Yesterday I was choosing music for this Sunday. I thought it might be cool to do some Hurd organ music. I had purchased some before the email exchange.

I looked at all the stuff I owned but decided I had already performed the good stuff. The remaining works seem pretentious to me now, but that might be a subjective reaction.

Probably not.

Instead I chose to schedule a postlude by another now deceased Episcopalian Alec Wyton based on “Crown Him with Many Crowns” and a rousing Capriccio by George Böhm which I have never performed.

I especially like the closing section which begins like this.

And goes to an exciting (IMO) fugal like climax.

I came home in the afternoon and put on several recordings of it to treadmill to.

Most of them were on harpsichord but I did find one on organ.

I have changed about listening to recordings of pieces I am working on. I now do almost all of my listening for pleasure.This includes when I am studying. So I put on the recordings because I like the pieces and enjoy hearing them as much as observing other people’s interp.

The idea that I would ape recordings (which used to be my objection to listening to pieces I was learning) is diluted also by the fact that I usually listen to several different recordings. Thus I don’t consciously or unconsciously begin to think of one of them as a definitive interp I should emulate.

Or so I tell myself.

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Valerie Eliot, Wife and Editor of T.S. Eliot, Dies at 86 – NYTimes.com

I have been reading Eliot’s work in the morning. So when his second wife died last Friday and her obit appeared in the NYT I was very interested in learning about him and her.

A lot of the obit was drawn from this linked interview of her.

I have just arrived at The Waste Land in my reading.

I have been slightly annoyed at how many allusions literary and otherwise he puts into his poetry. At this stage of my life, I feel a strong impulse to run them down on the internet.

Fortunately where The Waste Land is concerned I found two sites with hyperlinked notes.

The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot with Annotations

and

http://eliotswasteland.tripod.com/

very cool.

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Kafka in Beijing – By John Garnaut and Sanghee Liu | Foreign Policy

Kafka indeed. A young privileged woman claims to have been raped and runs into the same brick walls all Chinese do.

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Pressing the Pentagon – NYTimes.com

Very few Americans are held publicly responsible these days. Except of course they get caught fucking the wrong person. This editorial quotes Paul Yingling, a recently retired Army colonel, who “noted during some of the darkest days of the Iraq war, a private who loses his rifle is punished more than a general who loses his part of a war.” What a country.

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Mr. Hamilton’s Growth Strategy – NYTimes.com

Another history lesson.

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America’s Addled Puritanism | Via Meadia

America is simultaneously a licentious society as well as an uptight one. If you doubt this just think about the transmission of STDs which I believe remain at record numbers. Someone has to be fucking around, right?

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