One thing that you learn as an artist is that it’s good to have a patron. The popular illusion is of the independent entrepreneur who through the strength and novelty of their original vision captures the hearts and minds of the masses and markets their output commercially.
The truth is that every Vincent has at least a Theo and that financial success is like winning the lottery. Most who are ridden by a Muse die poor, young, and convinced they are despised.
Welcome our Benevolent Oligarch Masters.
As I had the good fortune a few years ago to be heard by Your Royal Highness, at Your Highness’s commands, and as I noticed then that Your Highness took some pleasure in the little talents which Heaven has given me for Music, and as in taking Leave of Your Royal Highness, Your Highness deigned to honour me with the command to send Your Highness some pieces of my Composition: I have in accordance with Your Highness’s most gracious orders taken the liberty of rendering my most humble duty to Your Royal Highness with the present Concertos, which I have adapted to several instruments; begging Your Highness most humbly not to judge their imperfection with the rigor of that discriminating and sensitive taste, which everyone knows Him to have for musical works, but rather to take into benign Consideration the profound respect and the most humble obedience which I thus attempt to show Him.
And he was just a Margrave, the equivalent of a Count or a Baron. Imagine if he were a Duke.
So here’s an audition piece for you.
Of course there’s more.
First the obligatories-
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when
we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED)the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
I would never make fun of LaEscapee or blame PhilJD. And I am highly organized.
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.
–Julius Caesar (I, ii, 140-141)
This Day in History
So back to the career of Johann Sebastian.
Johann was part of a great passel of Bachs most of whom were musicians of greater or lesser worth (and nobody was worth less than the infamous P.D.Q. Bach of whom Beethoven notably said, “What?”).
His father and uncles were all professionals and his brother corrupted his mind with pop music. He started out as an organist (which was a pretty rad keyboard at the time) and eventually landed a gig as court musician to the Prince of Anhalt-Köthen, an obscure German fiefdom now mostly known for having hosted J.S. for a time.
He hated it.
Brandenburg Concerto No. 6 in B flat major
The absence of violins is unusual. Viola da braccio means the normal viola, and is used here to distinguish it from the “viola da gamba”. When the work was written in 1721, the viola da gamba was already an old-fashioned instrument: the strong supposition that one viola da gamba part was taken by his employer, Prince Leopold, also points to a likely reason for the concerto’s composition- Leopold wished to join his Kapellmeister playing music. Other theories speculate that, since the viola da braccio was typically played by a lower socioeconomic class (e.g., servants), the work sought to upend the musical status quo by giving an important role to a “lesser” instrument. This is supported by knowledge that Bach wished to end his tenure under Prince Leopold. By upsetting the balance of the musical roles, he would be released from his servitude as Kapellmeister and allowed to seek employ elsewhere.
He wasn’t much respected during his life, over a third of his output was used as toilet paper or to wrap fish. His stature today started 50 years after his death and now he’s considered one of the cliches of classical music- Mozart, Bach, and Brahms.
How did you come by this knowledge ek?
Well, in High School I was never one of the ‘kool kidz’. I was a bando at best and while I lobbied for ‘band – aid’ (which is a much cooler name) it never quite caught on. I was President of the Diplomacy club because I owned a board. Now you might think that made me bitter and twisted but I had a circle of friends and we did amazing things, including a production of H.M.S. Pinafore that toured every school in town and did four shows at the main auditorium- one for the class (History), two for the student body (they couldn’t all fit in the auditorium at once), and one for the parents.
All without approval mind you, for most of the cast and crew it was an excuse to cut class.
As part of my youthful rebellion against conformity I didn’t listen to contemporary music. Instead I steeped myself in the classics which had the beneficial effect of convincing people that I wasn’t a revolutionary.
But I am.
News
U.S. Officers Kill Armed Civilians in Yemen Capital
By ERIC SCHMITT, The New York Times
MAY 9, 2014
A United States Special Operations commando and a Central Intelligence Agency officer in Yemen shot and killed two armed Yemeni civilians who tried to kidnap them while the Americans were in a barbershop in the country’s capital two weeks ago, American officials said on Friday.
…
News of the shootings comes at a perilous moment for the government of President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, whose collaboration with American drone strikes against suspected members of Al Qaeda is already a subject of seething resentment in Yemen. Yemenis believe, with some evidence, that the drone strikes often kill nearby civilians as well as their targets, so any indication that Mr. Hadi’s government helped conceal the killing of Yemenis by American commandos could be problematic.
…
The killings have an echo of a 2011 case in which a C.I.A. security officer, Raymond A. Davis, was jailed for weeks after killing two Pakistanis on a crowded street in Lahore. The ensuing furor brought relations between the C.I.A. and Pakistan’s spy service to perhaps their lowest ebb since the Sept. 11 attacks.
Forget Benghazi. Clinton’s Real Problem Is Obama Fatigue.
Brendan Nyhan, The New York Times
MAY 8, 2014
A far more significant threat to her potential candidacy is Americans’ desire for new leadership after eight years of the Obama administration. A Pew Research Center/USA Today poll found this week that 65 percent of Americans would “like to see a president who offers different policies and programs.” Only 30 percent said they wanted ones “similar to those of the Obama administration.”
Some of those disaffected citizens are presumably Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents who will ultimately support the party’s nominee in 2016, but the problem that the poll highlights is real. Alan Abramowitz, an Emory University political scientist, calls this the “time for change” effect (.pdf).
Honeybees abandoning hives and dying due to insecticide use, research finds
Damian Carrington, The Guardian
Friday 9 May 2014 11.45 EDT
The mysterious vanishing of honeybees from hives can be directly linked to insectcide use, according to new research from Harvard University. The scientists showed that exposure to two neonicotinoids, the world’s most widely used class of insecticide, lead to half the colonies studied dying, while none of the untreated colonies saw their bees disappear.
“We demonstrated that neonicotinoids are highly likely to be responsible for triggering ‘colony collapse disorder’ in honeybee hives that were healthy prior to the arrival of winter,” said Chensheng Lu, an expert on environmental exposure biology at Harvard School of Public Health and who led the work.
Pussy Riot members visit Occupy activist Cecily McMillan in prison
Jon Swaine, The Guardian
Friday 9 May 2014 16.21 EDT
Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina, who spent almost two years imprisoned in Russia after their group performed a “punk prayer” attacking President Vladimir Putin at an Orthodox cathedral in Moscow, met McMillan at Riker’s Island jail in New York, where she is being held awaiting sentencing.
McMillan, 25, faces up to seven years in prison after being found guilty of deliberately elbowing Officer Grantley Bovell in the face as he led her out of a protest at Zuccotti Park in Manhattan in March 2012. She was denied bail and is due to be sentenced by Judge Ronald Zweibel on 19 May.
…
The Guardian reported on Thursday that nine of the 12 jurors who convicted McMillan have written to Zweibel, asking him to show leniency and not punish her with a prison sentence.
An Apple deal may make Dr. Dre the ‘first billionaire in hip-hop.’ It’s a bittersweet victory.
By Chris Richards, Washington Post
Published: May 9
(W)hile the pursuit of wealth has always been a central theme in hip-hop – see also: “the American Dream” – Dre’s big payday shouldn’t be mistaken as a triumph for the genre. It’s merely an example of an artist getting much richer by abandoning art.
First, the Beats creation myth. It’s 2006, and a famous rapper-producer has been toiling over his comeback album for seven long years. He’s thinking of launching an athletic-shoe line when a pal, Interscope Records co-founder Jimmy Iovine, cooks up an idea to sell headphones to replace the lousy earbuds that come with everyone’s iPod. They give them a memorable design and speakers that ooze bass. They christen them “Beats By Dr. Dre.”
Today, Beats dominates the market, having sold roughly a billion dollars’ worth of headphones last year. With Apple stepping in, Forbes estimates that Dr. Dre’s net worth is about to spike to roughly $800 million, besting that of Sean “Diddy” Combs and Shawn “Jay Z” Carter, two artists who redefined the trajectory of rap music with zeroes and commas and mergers and acquisitions.
…
So when Apple decides to give it a price tag of $3.2 billion (a number first reported by the Financial Times), rap fans are going to celebrate. They don’t see the sale as a one-percenter heaping onto his fortune. They might not even see it as the crowning of “the first billionaire in hip-hop, right here from the expletive] West Coast,” as Dre triumphantly described himself in a [piece of home video that appeared online Friday. Instead, they see their culture gaining leverage in a capitalist system that’s been historically inhospitable to young black entrepreneurs. As hip-hop enters its middle age, it’s finally being recognized for what it is: highly valuable.
From Davos to Big Sur, Geithner Recounts Staring Into the Abyss
By Jeff Kearns and Robert Schmidt, Bloomberg News
May 10, 2014 12:00 AM ET
“With the knowledge we have today, it’s clear we didn’t do enough,” he writes. “Before the crisis, I didn’t push for the Fed in Washington to strengthen the safeguards for banks, nor did I push for legislation in Congress to extend the safeguards to non-banks.”
…
Geithner recounts one meeting he had with then Senator Scott Brown, a Republican Warren later defeated. After discussing their children and triathlons, Brown told Geithner that he would support the legislation as long as it watered down a provision banning proprietary trading championed by former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, according to the book.Brown proposed allowing banks to invest as much as 3 percent of their capital in hedge funds and private-equity funds. The Obama administration ceded to the demand.
“My staff didn’t like this, and neither did Volcker, but there wasn’t much we could do about it,” Geithner writes. “We needed 60 votes for reform.”
Despite Senate hopes of speedy release, CIA torture report won’t be made public for months
By Jonathan S. Landay, McClatchy
May 7, 2014
The procedure, however, likely will take months, several experts said. That’s because it’s complex and time-consuming. Not only does the CIA have to review information that came from its archives, but other U.S. intelligence agencies as well as the Pentagon and the State Department have to evaluate material that they provided, they said.
“You can’t get this done in a month and do a serious job,” said Mark Lowenthal, a former senior CIA intelligence analyst. “You only get one shot at scrubbing it.”
…
The CIA “could demonstrate good faith by releasing the least problematic portions of the text, like the introduction, conclusions and high-level findings. But they’re not doing that and that strikes me as at least bordering on bad faith,” said Steven Aftergood, who runs the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy. “Why does the entire volume need to be held hostage to the most difficult piece of information?”
Blogs
Obama Court Nominee OK’d Targeted Assassinations
TheMomCat, The Stars Hollow Gazette
What it comes down to is, they really don’t like us
by Robyn, Docudharma
Massive Gag Policy Is Expanded & Imposed on US Intelligence Employees in Response to Edward Snowden
by Kevin Gosztola, Firedog Lake
Keith Alexander Unplugged: on Bush/Obama, 1.7 million stolen documents and other matters
by Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept
Books Go Boom! Ivan Turgenev’s ‘Fathers and Sons’
by Brecht, Daily Kos
What Happened In Seattle is Good Economics, Good Politics, and a Small Start to Something Bigger!
by joedemocrat, Daily Kos
The Evening Blues – 5-9-14
by joe shikspack, Daily Kos
I Got Bit by a Snake
by LaEscapee, Daily Kos
“I’d like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves. I hope we passed the audition.”
1 comments
Author