Posted by Danny on Monday, November 22, 2010 at 12:54 pm
A whole bunch of Evenings for Brainses ago our conversation turned to the decline of funding for orchestras and the loss of public interest and understanding in concert music generally. I remember I was advancing (in part on behalf of Satan) that the end orchestras would not be synonymous with the end of culture or even with the end of sophisticated music—that, though tragic especially for the last few, lonely members of a moribund species, species do go extinct; languages do go extinct; crafts do go extinct, and life continues impoverished in that sense but certainly able to develop new species, languages, crafts, etc. For music specifically, there are neat, crowd-sourced newcomer-species like Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir, arriving with the growth of access to the Internet and to creation tools; the musical language in which one needed to be fluent to understand the ideas of complex concert music is changing, like any other living language (if also simplifying); multi-track digital audio workstation software, sophisticated digital signal processing, and especially physical modeling synthesis, challenge the definition of “musician” and the nature of the craft. Rah, rah, rah. At the time, even though I was exploring the above position in earnest, I was pontificating far outside of my aesthetic: I abhor extinction because I like information; not—and this is a much better reason—because diversity of species, of ideas, and of skills makes for a more resilient system in which to live.[1] It doesn’t really matter, though, since at the time, I didn’t go to concerts or speak Concert Music; my positions were tediously academic.
Joel returned to Toronto from his work in Mongolia this summer and Gid and I became housemates in October, so I’ve had a sudden influx of concert music in my life. Among other things, this has meant three (so far) trips to Roy Thompson Hall to see the Toronto Symphony Orchestra in the last two months, after a drought that probably goes back to Grade Nine. I’ve noticed some things I want to tell you about.
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Posted by Danny on Tuesday, October 27, 2009 at 12:34 am
In my final year of undergrad at Nipissing, I took a second-year American Literature course to round out my fairly pathetic spatter of regional and period coverage. As we approached the modern period and started reading modern poets, I discovered a deep sense of alienation from the text that was clearly not shared by (or at any rate, novel to) most of the rest of the class. Unlike earlier poetry, which had for me achieved its startling, evocative, or plainly gorgeous imagery and wordplay in tandem with its clear and compressed message, the poets of the 1920s didn’t seem to care about—yea, assiduously scorned—their audiences. Shock, originality, inscrutable faithfulness to the language of their inner voices, and subjective interpretability dominated our readings; after several months of strolling down welcoming galleries of meticulous and pleasing artifice and mastery, I felt myself a trespasser in someone’s contemptuously unkempt private room. This fed nicely my prejudice that the best poetry—the only poetry worth reading—was written before the end of World War I, and that the rest of the course would consist of this miserable dross.
Then, we were given Robert Frost. He was welcoming (famously), obviously conscientious of the comprehension of his audience, obviously sensitive to the expected rhythms and cadences of the old poetic forms even when he chose not to employ them—in short, he was my renewed hope for the poetry of Modernity and a balm for my gloomy, disappointed brain.
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Posted by Danny on Thursday, June 18, 2009 at 11:13 pm
Dad was a devotee of computers probably minutes after discovering them as an undergraduate at Waterloo in the 70s. He repeatedly tried to instil the same wonder and excitement in me, groping for ways to connect the nature of computing machines to my own interests and probably disappointingly artsy foci—anything, at least, to extend their significance beyond the video games I was playing. One of the early uses, I learned, was for academics studying literature to compute word frequencies in texts, which was for me at once a completely novel idea, and seemed spectacularly boring and pointless.[1]
I hadn’t thought much about it until “tag clouds” started popping up on popular sites and the possibilities of this kind of data visualisation started revealing themselves despite my benightment. Recently, Geoff brought Wordle to my attention. Read more »
Posted by Danny on Monday, May 18, 2009 at 6:39 pm
Only by the innocent standards of laymen am I a connoisseur of pens. I know a few of the more salient companies—Parker, Pilot, Montblanc, Pelikan—though I’ve very little idea how they compare in the eyes of more worthy experts, and certainly to speak with confidence to the granular merits of particular makes would require deeper investigation than I’ve yet committed. I am beginning to experiment with coloured inks, though I still feel uncomfortable using anything other than my staple black Quink, a medium so unassuming that it’s stocked at every Business Depot I’ve been to. I know what capillary action is and why a key design component of ink is the management of its surface tension, but I’d want a few minutes to consult Wikipedia before I could describe the construction and mechanics of a typical fountain pen. I only own two pens. I am soft-core. Read more »
Danny Fekete is studying education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, appropriately. 