Jon Batiste and Curtis J. Stewart have been nominated for best contemporary classical composition and best classical instrumental solo for “Movement 11’” and Of Power respectively. Some people are upset:
Composer Marc Neikrug, a former Grammy nominee, told the Observer that Batiste is a pop musician and that nominating his recording for a classical music award is baffling. “How much sense do you think it makes to a serious novelist when Bob Dylan gets a Nobel prize for literature?”, he said. “It’s not that what Bob Dylan does isn’t magnificent in what it is. But it’s not Nobel literature.”
Apostolos Paraskevas, who teaches at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, also complained:
“I’m not going to say that classical music is better than jazz. I love both genres,” he said. “Both of those musicians deserve the recognition for their work. But we cannot compare apples and oranges.”
He added: “If you look at the nominees for the best contemporary classical composition, you see amazing musicians who write operas and symphonies. Batiste’s piece is two minutes long, someone playing sequences in the jazz style. If this person gets an award, this is a big slap on our face. It’s a message to everyone that we should give up and just do this.”
Listen to both works. Individual songs in Curtis J. Stewart’s album are certainly classical, but not the album as a whole, which is a mix of variations on bluegrass, classical, and pop, with some partial spoken word performances sprinkled in. Jon Batiste is clearly jazz.
This cannot be said, of course, but I wonder if these selections were motivated by the need to have black artists represented in these categories. Stewart’s album has the advantage of being very much of the moment with songs like “StayWoke” and “#HerName.”
In other news
Control is underrated in film and writing, Jason Guriel argues in a piece on the late Peter Bogdanovich at the Yale Review:
The desire for control can feel obsessive, even paranoid. Think of Phil Spector, rock’s Ur-autocrat, relentlessly driving session musicians through take after take in search of his Wall of Sound, while micromanaging every detail of the life of his spouse, the singer Ronnie Spector, down to her shoes. Too much craft can seem too controlling, too conscientious. We like our artists a little rumpled. So, as virtues go, control is underrated. And yet when it’s present, we feel it. See, for instance, Stanley Kubrick’s trademark tracking shots, which are so distinctive we might as well be peering through the director’s very pupils.
We’re indebted to Heidegger for today’s obsession with identity, David P. Goldman writes, and for its destructive consequences:
Secular philosophers cannot easily dispense with Heidegger because they want the same thing that he wanted, namely “to make Man the ‘Master of Being,’” as Arendt noted. That is also what Arendt wanted, and she helped de-Nazify Heidegger in full knowledge of what he was. Arguably, Heidegger’s influence now is greater than ever; through his doctoral student Herbert Marcuse and Jean-Paul Sartre, Heidegger is the inspiration for today’s endemic belief that identity is a matter of self-invention. Heidegger is the grandfather of identity politics, of radical subjectivism, and rampant irrationality. As in Unreason now runs amok. This is Heidegger’s inheritance.
What happened to that statue of Voltaire in Paris?
What would the City of Light be without one of its Enlightenment luminaries? For eighteen months concerned Parisians have missed a statue of philosopher and historian Voltaire, which disappeared from its plinth in August 2020 during a wave of statue-toppling around the world. Rumors spread that Voltaire — real name François-Marie Arouet — was a victim of “cancel culture”, removed by politically correct City Hall officials because, while he wrote denouncing slavery, he owed part of his fortune to colonial-era trade and has been accused of racism and antisemitism… Now deputy Paris mayor Karen Taïeb, has said the statue will be back on a pedestal “some time this year”, adding that it was found to be in need of restoration, having been vandalized and damaged not only by the paint but by the elements.
In praise of Dong Phuong’s king cakes: “To say that the Dong Phuong king cakes are popular across the Mardi Gras tier of the South is an understatement: The bakery has a landline, Garza explains, but it’s connected to an answering machine because the phone remains swamped with calls. There’s even a lively subreddit devoted to the state of the waiting line at the bakery to pick up the cakes.”
Adam Kirsch reviews Philip Oltermann’s The Stasi Poetry Circle: “In The Stasi Poetry Circle, Philip Oltermann, the Guardian’s Berlin bureau chief, shows what happened when the communist obsession with literature came to Germany, a country whose reverence for Dichter und Denker (poets and thinkers) amounted to an ideology of its own. Unlike most historians of literature, however, Oltermann doesn’t view the subject from the top down. The most famous names in East German letters, like Christa Wolf or Anna Seghers, are barely mentioned here. Instead, he tells the stories of complete unknowns such as Annegret Gollin.”
B.D. McClay reviews Kenneth Branagh’s second Agatha Christie film Death on the Nile:
For most of its runtime, Death on the Nile is fine — you could watch it on an airplane, or drunk, or whatever, without suffering too much. I watched it sitting next to three teenage boys who liked it well enough. As in Murder on the Orient Express, Branagh diversifies the cast (good) but partly so he can make various characters victims of racism (questionable). He remixes and streamlines the other parts of the story, sticking close to the central love triangle, which makes the movie less of a puzzle but is, for a movie, inevitable to some degree. Clips of Gal Gadot’s weirdly stiff performance have already made the rounds on Twitter, but as Simon and Linnet, Armie Hammer and Gadot both play characters whose primary trait is their physical beauty. Whatever you think of them, they are beautiful people; they do all right . . . No, the movie tips into the truly bad — the transcendently bad, even — when it comes to every decision Branagh makes playing Poirot.
How federalist were the Founders? Allen Guelzo explores:
It was clear to the leading American minds of the time that there was no way the states were ever going to be persuaded to give up their individual authorities and identities and allow themselves to be blended into a single entity with the power to exercise unified economic or political authority. If there was any hope for the survival of the United States, they knew it would have to involve some kind of concession to a federation structure, one composed of a national government with enough authority to tame the insolence of the state governments yet not so much that it would cause them to rebel. In near despair, Washington wrote, “certain I am, that unless adequate Powers are given to Congress for the general purposes of the Federal Union that we shall soon moulder into dust and become contemptible in the Eyes of Europe, if we are not made the sport of their politicks.” As if to give point to that fear, the inhabitants of the contested borderland between New Hampshire and New York that we know today as Vermont opened negotiations with Frederick Haldimand, the governor-in-chief of Quebec, to explore the possibility of returning to British rule. Even worse, in 1786, a violent tax revolt known as Shays’s Rebellion broke out in western Massachusetts. With no federal army at hand to suppress the uprising, the governor of Massachusetts was forced to raise a private army, which he funded by passing the hat to 153 wealthy Bostonians.
