Ode to Moms

I can't find the really fast version, but this is hilarious, even if you're not a mom. Check it out.

Getting back in

I have a vexing dilemma at work.

You know how your parents told you not to lie, because once you start, you have to keep telling bigger and bigger lies to cover up the first one? They were right. I have a colossal snowball-sized problem.

So before I rot in hell for lying, please help me. Some of you know the nature of my dilemma. Let's suppose, that like me, you're a 50 year old lesbian, give or take a few years. (I'm also a polygamist, but I can't tell if people at work actually believe me or whether they are just humoring me.) But let's suppose, hypothetically, that that's not true. (Of course, this is purely hypothetical, because, I, of course, do not ever lie or use fictitious names on this blog.)

Let's also suppose you have co-workers who believe--and have believed for the past three years--that you are 40 or 50 and gay, and they well-meaningly start setting you up with um, other gay people who are 50ish.

I was off the hook this time, b/c the set-up-ee preferred redheads (phew!), but let's suppose that I have no interest in going out on dates with fifty-something year old gay women. Not that there's anything wrong with fifty-something y-o women. We can be friends, but I'm just not interested in dating a woman who's almost my mom's age.

So do I come out (or go in) and come clean, before this situation goes out of hand?

The irony is that I initially became lesbian so people would leave me alone, but instead, my plan seems to have backfired on me, because people want to know all sorts of details about kissing girls, what my parents think, whether they are supportive, what I'm going to do about conceiving children, etc. etc., and quite frankly, I have no freaking idea.

But at this point, I have so much (in?)vested in my gayness that, I'm not sure whether/how to come out.

Damnit. Why are people so freaking nosy?

Peeing in someone's cherrios

Pardon the graphic expression, but wow. I really managed to stoke someone's ire. I shouldn't laugh at someone getting so worked up over this, but this is kindof amusing to see someone take something so inconsequential so seriously. I mean, it's one thing to get riled up over the mistreatment of POWs or the injustices of the world, but all I did was ask whether Eric Satie's music was considered classical. Some time ago, I posted this query on FB's PCME group.

Now I have to admit that I don't know much about this guy, but one day, one of my local radio stations was having a Satie-fest. I tried listening to the first piece and didn't care for it much. Listened to the second piece, but eventually, it got relegated to background music. Turned off radio. Thirty minutes later, without knowing who was on, I turned it back on and I hear more new-agey stuff that sounds similar to the stuff I tried listening to earlier. Shut off radio again.

I am probably going to get flamed as I did in this group for making oversweeping generalizations without giving him a more thorough listen, probably, but the few pieces I've heard of his (Gymnopedie 1, 2, 3?) don't sound terribly complex. It sounds like the vapid tuneful stuff that our classical music radio station might play.

If people like his stuff, that is totally fine by me. Personally, I'd much prefer to listen to Bach, Beethoven, Nielsen, Messiaen or Janacek or heck, even that dreaded canon that everyone so dislikes. De gustibus non disputandum est, right?

I was told that perhaps I don't appreciate his music because I didn't know that Satie owned 20 of the exact same outfit. Ok, fair enough. As I write this post, I'm trying to relisten to the Gymnopedie sets again, imagining a wardrobe of 20 of the same things to see if I appreciate him more.

Um, I don't mean to sound like a philistine, but I'd still prefer to listen to Bach over this, as pretty as I'm sure it sounds. And knowing that he owns 20 identical suits doesn't quite help me realize why this one is any more worth listening to than the earlier one.

Anyway, this Satie fan got a tad bit peeved by my lack of appreciation for Satie, and wrote thus:

Dear _____, what's the opposite of love? No silly, it's not hate it's indifference. Love and hate are strong emotions and indifference is their opposite. Do I have to walk you through it again or can I continue? Satie's music clearly brings out strong emotions in your like and there is a good reason for this. It is a matter of comprehension. A matter of having the artistic sensibilities to understand his music. I will paraphrase Schoenberg - 'if you don't understand some music, you don't TRULY understand ALL music'. Therefore the strong emotion you feel for Satie's music comes from the fact that his music presents a challenge to you that you fail. You 'love' to see yourself as an elitist in the field of classical music and base too much of your self esteem on this and so good old Satie annoys you by separating the wheat from the chaff, and the true elitists from the likes of you. PS 'ennui' is in the head of the beholder!

Admittedly you aren't helped by the fact that most of the recordings of Satie's music do not capture the art that exists therein. (I'm thinking particularly of Ciccolini's efforts.) You should try the versions by John McCabe, Reinbert De Leeuw or Poulenc/ Fevrier. If you still don't get it (as I suspect you won't) you just have to accept that classical music 'elitism' is not for you and instead you could cultivate some other more appropriate area of life eg stamp collecting, Harry Potter books etc where your own unique gifts will no doubt be more suited. Sorry _____, I know the truth sometimes hurts. I feel for you. One love.

I think I'm supposed to be riled by this, but it's so poorly written, I'm not sure what exactly I'm supposed to respond to. First, I can't figure out his use of quotes. Second, I don't remember ever saying that I "hated" his music or that it evoked strong emotions out of me. Au contraire, actually. Apathy is a better word to describe how I feel towards Satie's music on an initial listen. Third, I am in a group that calls itself "pretentious", but mostly because many of the other classical music discussion groups on FB are quite inane.
(To wit: comapare and contrast most recent discussion threads:
This "Classical music" group has no recent discussions.
I'm a fermata; hold me: some stupid instrument game where you add a point to your favorite instrument and deduct a point for your least favorite. (No thanks.)
PCME: An expedition into just intonation, with someone posting about his explorations of this tuning system.)

I would never in a zillion years think of myself as an elitist, much less "love to see myself as an 'elitist'", considering I'm still working on appreciating Mahler and long Bruckner symphonies, but I find the elitists' discussions (usually) much more interesting.

But other than those quibbles, I mostly agree with what he has to say. I'm not sure how to refute his arguments.

By blogging about this, I've already given this more attention than it deserves (ah, such is the irony of blogging about things we think are "trivial" or "stupid". . .), but it just reinforces my belief that we take our inconsequential internet lives/personas way too seriously.

I now understand why Facebook's net worth is valuated higher than the GDP of Bolivia or Jordan.

My pre-summer estivation plans

Being away from the internet this whole weekend made me realize that I do far more productive things with my life when I'm not blogging or randomly surfing the net or bloviating about my favorite 20th century composition, etc. on Facebook's discussion groups. I always think I am an internet junkie (aren't we all? Those of us who read/write blogs and do FB), but when I was away from it, I did not miss it one bit.

Thus, much as I love this anonymous introspective rambling thing too much to give it up, I think I might either need to reduce the frequency of my so-called introspective babble or be off of this for a while, so I can focus on more important things.

One of the things attending this wedding made me realize is that 1. my life has not changed much (jobs, etc) for the past several years. In other words, I've been stagnant and resisting the steps required for change and self-improvement. Also, 2. I feel "behind"—so behind with many aspects of my life. Unlike the authors of many blogs I read or my fellow ensemble members, I cannot seem to strike a good balance in my life or sort out my priorities (e.g. blogging vs. reading Tolstoy. Balancing work, life, sensible living, and relationships, etc.)

At the end of the day, 5 people might read my blog and maybe one might like what they read, but I probably should be reading more Tolstoy (metaphorically speaking), and writing less Dear-Ann-Landers-esque blogs.

Or better yet, figuring out how I'm going to add value to this world. I think at this point, it's too late to emulate Mozart and write that epoch-making symphony. (Or hell, 104 of them, if you're Haydn.) I console myself with the thought that we can't all be Mozarts or Haydns, right? Some of us need to be menial office workers, right? (Humph. Hardly a consolation.)

That pesky “what to do with my life” question that perpetually overhangs and haunts. I wish I had an answer, really. This can mean many things—relationships, figuring out future plans, my career.

There are the more discrete, more tangible ways one can self-explore. Choir has been part of this. Exploring classical music has been part of this. Pursuing various hobbies, meeting new people, trying new things, and heck, blogging—all of these activities have been a part of this, as has traveling.

But I’m starting to wonder whether these smaller “self-exploration” missions are actually part of my long-term self-exploration project, or whether it’s actually a ploy to keep myself incredibly busy so as to evade the larger self-exploration process that I probably should’ve done in my 20s and I really need to do.

All of these aforementioned activities keep me happy and make me more whole as a person, and thus I continue to do them.

However, as the fourth decade of my life quickly passes by (faster than I would like), I wonder: would I be happy in my current state of affairs—sans career, sans any major accomplishments, and living in a tiny box sans couch or TV—at 40? Once upon a time, I thought this way about turning 30, but now, 30 seems so young, and 40 seems, well, closer and closer. (And already there, if anyone at work is reading this.)

Perhaps it’s futile and flattery to compare myself to Mozart—so I’m not going to do that, but even as I know full well that most of us are no Mozarts, I keep having a Mozart-induced mid-life crisis as I get closer to the age of his death. By a mere 35 or 36 years of age, he had done so much with his life. Why can’t I accomplish a mere fraction of what he had produced in his lifetime?

Which brings me back to the Big Life Question.

It’s not that I’m expecting to figure out the never-ending puzzle which is life by not blogging. Nor do I necessarily believe that my friends who have figured out their career, started families and own a house have “figured out” their life. These are but the external trappings of the more intangible never-ending life quest.

But they have the sort of stability that I sometimes envy.

Sometimes it’s nice to still be in the exploratory “transient” stage. Particularly, as an INFP, I like open-ended possibilities and often don’t like definition. But there is this sort of societal expectation, that you need to be “established” (whatever that means) by a certain age.

For women, part of this unfortunately ties in with our damn biological clock. For example, if I decide that I want to have kids, there is a time limit for pursuing this. (It also requires, well, other forces of biology, which in turn requires all sorts of other efforts, rituals, courtship, etc.) I don’t want to spend my entire life obsessing about whether or not this will happen, so I haven’t been, nor have I decided one way or another (or at least not to the extent that I want to admit openly on a public blog, though I think the truth is that we are programmed in some way that many of us do want to perpetuate our lifeline somehow), but the point is that I haven’t excluded the possibility and thus, like it or not, this does somewhat overhang as I think about The Next Few Years Ahead Before I Reach The Age That Mozart Died.

Do you see how I love this introspective babble? I don’t even know if I’m making the slightest bit of sense or if anyone reads my anonymous nonlinear internet-induced mind babble. It is cathartic though, to write thus and imagine an attentive audience to whom this might make any sense or have any meaning, so I appreciate your letting me indulge.

On that note, however, I may need to go into blog-estivation mode for a while. I haven’t decided, since that is the epitome of being a P (of the Myers-Briggs kind).

I need to cut down on my potential distractions as I mull over things, sort out my priorities and catch up on the myriad of things that I am so behind in.

Or maybe I'll be back sooner than I think. . ..

S's wedding and friendship and advice

I spent the weekend in Sacramento at S's wedding. It was a lovely wedding. It got a tad cold toward the end, but otherwise, the weather was very cooperative.

* * * * * * * *

I. Friendship and S

I have known S since the first week of my freshman year in college, when he accosted us for weeks to try to borrow our computer, so he could allegedly "hack" into a professor's computer and download the answer key to a CS exam. We were naïve freshmen who believed him and refused on a daily basis, but he kept persisting and coming back. It took us a few weeks of this courtship ritual to realize that this was his sense of humor and that he was totally joking. That was quintessential S. We became friends.

He lived on our floor, so we spent quite a bit of time together. He was always in our suite. Several times we came back from classes (4 out of 6 of us were all freshman engineers in the honors program, so we had the same class schedule), and found him lounging in our living room.

Another time, he took all of the furniture out of my suitemate's bedroom and exchanged it with the furniture in the lounge.

Then he graduated, I moved out here, and we lost touch for a few years as our paths diverged.

As luck would have it, he ended up taking a job that brought him out here quite a bit, and so we hung out a lot for 2 or 3 years--I think between 2000 and 2003.

He is one of these friends that I can not see for several years and then catch up exactly where we left off. I distinctly remember his first visit out here—it had been maybe 4 or 5 years since I last saw him, and I felt like we never left college. We had pizza at some chain Italian place in a strip mall somewhere, and I remember discussing how comfortable our friendship still felt after all of these years.

These never-changing friendships—the older I get and the more I change—seem to be fewer and farther between. I've drifted apart from many of my grade school friends, and even some more recently acquired ones. Sometimes, as in the case of my hallmark friendships, we outgrow each other. I always feel kindof sad when this happens, though usually by the time this happens, it's often too late; I've outgrown it enough that it doesn't seem worth salvaging, to hold onto what used to be.

Sometimes, when the other person outgrows faster than you outgrow them, it's hard. You want the relationship to stay the same, but it inevitably changes, as we change as human beings. You accept that some friendships weren't meant to last and move on, I guess kindof like with old relationships.

Sometimes, you wish you had better closure. Two of my friendships, rather than gradually drifting apart, ended rather abruptly. Partly, I admit this is because I can be a friend nazi. If I try hard to make plans to see you, I don't want to get an email always last minute cancelling, or telling me that "I'm all booked every weekend, because I have dinner plans with Moe, Joe, and Hoe. I can only meet you on Thursdays at the Livermore family in the park Thursdays, between the hours of 6 and 7 p.m., because after that, we have to leave promptly to put Lea to bed."

I understand and am more than willing to work around bedtime schedules, but it is impossible for me to get to Livermore at 6 on weekdays. Plus the "I'm all booked" tone that is endemic to this area really irks me. So with this friend, I just never wrote back. Nor did my friend. Ah well. Ten years of friendship out like that. (But if the friendship was important to her, she would've written back or followed up right? )

Through all of these years, S remains one of my close friends. When he was single and he came out here on business trips, we spent quite a bit of time together—sometimes too much time—or so I thought at the time. Now I regret not having taken more advantage of his availability. I used to be able to call him any time.

So although I am 93 percent happy for him, 7 percent of me is slightly sad to lose this neverending access to him.

I also regret not appreciating him more while he was single. Isn't that funny how it works? You appreciate someone more when they are no longer available. This seems to be my recurring pattern in life. If they call you incessantly, you ignore them, but then as soon as they become out of commission or are no longer interested in you, you retroactively appreciate them and want more access to them. Stupid brain.

Not that I didn't appreciate him before. But we were both single, and while I busied myself with violin lessons, choir, classes, he seemed to always want to get together and go someplace far on very short notice. One time, I was working on some Bach piece and couldn't fathom the idea of being away from my instrument for 4 days (right before a lesson!), so I brought my violin with me when he dragged me to some last minute excursion to Morrow Bay. It seems utterly ridiculous now, (well, ok, it still seems ridiculous to get a private instruction after 4 straight days of not practicing, but I suppose I could've postponed the lesson.) but made sense at the time. And bless S for putting up with my irrationalities of all sorts.

* * * * * * * *

II. All the things I need to know I learned from S.
S is also one of the smartest and most sensible people I know. As much as I sometimes hate to admit this, he is almost always right. I still follow his many sagely pieces of advice that he has dispensed over the years. Here are some of them.

1. One cannot double-integrate e^-x2. Being an engineering dropout, I unfortunately cannot remember enough multivariable calc to derive the proof to this, but if needed, I think I can brandish my old calculus notebook to prove this.

2. One should put up smiling photographs if one ever decides to try internet dating.

3. When one get his/her first real job, the first thing one should do is pay off all debts. Actually better yet, don't get into debt, which well, some of us don't have the luxury of avoiding. (Though fortunately, I never amassed any debt in grad or undergrad, since I learned to live on less than $1000 per month. In the Bay Area, I add.) After getting out of debt, the next thing one should do is to save up six months of living expenses-before spending on big ticket items, like a trip or new car.

This I did, and then passed on this advice to my younger brother.

4. One should put as much as one can into his retirement plan and increase his contributions every time he gets a raise. (Check.)

5. Never buy a new car. Actually, this one depends on one's life and financial circumstances, but in my transient don't-know-where-I'll-be-three-years-from-now state, it doesn't make any sense to buy a new car, since a car depreciates 50 percent of its value in three years. The one thing about a new car is that you know its history. Still, for the most part, if you can find a used car that has been well taken care of, given its rapid rate of depreciation, it makes more sense to buy used. I'd rather spend the money on good food and travel.

6. If one is going to buy a car, one should pay in cash. Again, very few people do this, but I agree with him 100 percent on this one. Obviously, it depends on your circumstances, since sometimes your car just dies and you might not have a choice, but I never understood the logic of people who take out an 8 percent loan for a car (which means that in 4.5 years, you have paid in interest 50 percent of the value of the car) for a 4 or 5-year term, for something whose value depreciates to less than half its original value in three years. If you have a million dollars to burn, I suppose it doesn't matter, but if you earn less than say $70K, you are spending a lot of money on interest payments.

6a., a corollary to 6 is that one should avoid paying interest on things that depreciate, if one's life situation allows it. I guess this is another way of saying live within one's means. (Though obviously, many of my grad-school or starving artist friends who live on less than $2K/month can't nec. do this.)

7. If one really wants something, persist, even if one fails. S is also a persister. Sometimes I cursed him for it, but for the most part, this is something I need to work on, whether it be dating, jobs, musical instruments, or just life in general. I think I give up too easily. One of my goals is to work on this.

8. Being frugal but generous. Although S is frugal, he is also extremely generous and knows how to spend money on things that are important to him (e.g. a memorable meal or a used luxury car). I used to get annoyed when he'd pay for many of my dinners and excursions when we hung out, but I was earning a piddling and he was earning a lot more, and he never seemed to mind subsidizing things I couldn't otherwise afford to do, so eventually I gave up.

Instead, I now try to do reciprocate the generosity to other people (e.g. my grad student friends).

Also, rather than spend $ on that daily latte or lunch or other "meh" convenience items, I'd rather skip those and splurge on a nice meal or an opera ticket, which is what I do for the most part.

* * * * * * * *

III. L

L is the right person for S, because she appreciates him for who he is. S is a truly wonderful person, but sometimes with eccentricities that other women didn't necessarily appreciate. For example, only engineers appreciate his constant reminder to us that you can't double-integrate e^-x2. Whereas it took us several weeks to figure out the real S, L did it in one date, which just reinforces the idea that L is right for S.

I worried about whether S. would become less S-like and more subdued as a result of getting together with L, (as guy sometimes do when they become attached or fall in love) but he's still more or less the same way as I knew him, and better and many ways, because L seems to bring out S's best qualities. Of course I say this based on my short meeting with her at the wedding.

* * * * * * * *

IV. L and S's wedding
S and L's wedding was lovely, which I realize is a mega cliché. Weddings make me really happy. It's wonderful to see one of your closest and dearest in their best element and radiant.

Every time I go to one, I regret not making more of a concerted effort to go to the far away ones (e.g. ones in Japan, Atlanta, Germany, etc.).

Sometimes, it is a time for catching up with old friends, though the last few weddings I have attended have not been like this. At this particular wedding, I didn't know many people (no one from our original college group was there), other than snake and shy friend. So it was nice to see them and quasi-catch up with them.

I sat next to a group of lovely single ladies, dubbed the "dog park girls", b/c they all met via their dogs. I spent most of my time talking to the single guy at my table, b/c I have an easier time one-on-one than being the token stranger in a big group of people who already know each other. Plus I have an inherent fear of dogs, so I didn't want to spend the entire evening talking about dogs. The girls were very nice and I think tried to include me, but I'm just bad at these situations, and I was also not seated in an optimal location to hear most of their conversations.

* * * * * * * *

V. Stupid traditions
I've decided that this is the last time that I'm going to take part in the bouquet-throwin/catching tradition. I know there is a similar tradition for guys, but of the dozen plus weddings I've been to, whereas most have had the bouquet-throwing tradition where all of the single females line up and try to catch the bouquet, only two have had the equivalent single-guy-lineup event.

Perhaps because I'm single, I have all sorts of issues (and yes, insecurities) with this dumb tradition. First off, it's sexist, because I rarely see the guy equivalent tradition being carried out at the weddings I've attended. So if you are female, everyone at the wedding knows of your legal attachment—or lack thereof—status, which quite frankly, is none of anyone's beeswax. Then there is the notion of catching the bouquet—which is supposed to signify that you will be the next one to wed.

Now, there are times I feel secure about being single, but other times—like at a wedding—it brings out the worst insecurities in me, and part of this is because of traditions of this ilk, where the implication underlying these rituals is that girls are supposed to get married and everyone wants to be married (because we all want to catch the bouquet).

Truth be told, I probably would want to get married if I ever meet the right guy (or girl, if anyone at work is reading this), but I don't necessarily want to get married for the sake of getting married, just because society expects you to. I also know of other independent-minded women and men who have no interest in getting "married off" to someone, thank you very much.

Thus, I have decided that I am no longer going to do this silly lineup to catch the bouquet. Call me the curmudgeon for bashing such a beloved tradition, but the older I get, the more self-conscious I feel about being in the cattle lineup and getting inspected by the rest of the holier-than-thou-because-I-have-a-status crowd whilst donning my "not-married" invisible scarlet A badge for all to see.

* * * * * * * *

L and S, I wish you many years of love, laughter, happiness and peace.

Das Rheingold--Version A and Version B

Sometimes I read these things and wonder a) if critic A and critic B went to the same performance, and if so, b) how two very knowledgeable people who are for the most part, fair reviewers, could have such drastically different appraisals of the same performance.

Critic A gushes about the performance, and writes a lovely review, while critic B doesn't write a scathing review, but doesn't seem convinced.

Searching--nay, hunting--for classical music reviews

I don't know why the local papers make it utterly impossible to find classical music reviews but this is one of my major grievances with some of these papers.

Sure, I can Google it, but then sometimes, I end up finding out more information than I really want to know, such as the disposition of a certain critic's undergarments (read the comments), when all I wanted to do was read about Wang's performance.

But then again, I wouldn't have discovered this site or have met this 686-year old chess prodigy who has a predilection for palindromes or his 1006-year old brother who doesn't dig palindromes, but prefers lysol. It's fascinating the kind of people you meet online, b/c I'm fairly certain that I'd never meet a 686-year old chess prodigy or someone whose hobby is lysol in real life. But I digress.

We were talking about newspapers that make it really hard for one to find music reviews.

Take the S.F. Chronicle. I read the Chron for two things--its food section in actual print paper format, and when I can find it, Joshua Kosman's reviews. I occasionally read other reviews and click on some of the most popular articles if any strike my fancy, but by and large, I don't like the Chron, except for those two sections.

But they make it nearly impossible to find these classical music reveiws, which is one reason I don't like them. For example, today, I was looking for a review for SF Opera's "Das Rheingold". Except that I couldn't spell Rheingold correctly, so a search for this on the SF Gate website yielded nada.

Then I tried to find the review the way I normally find articles, which is to navigate the subject tabs starting with the front page. 1. I start at SFgate.com. I don't see "art" or "music", so I click on "entertainment", which is my first objection. That takes me to this horrible page, with bad design--lots of distracting graphics, headings in microscopic font, and nary a music category to be seen. 2. I scroll down if I can see an obvious opera or classical music category. no. 3. On the top section, there is a "performances" tab, so I click on that. It takes me to this page. On the top menu, there is a link for opera. Aha. Easier than I thought. 4. I click on it. It takes me to a search page with no content. Alas. 5. I hit the back button to go back to the performances page.

Grievance number two is that none of the articles listed on this page have authors listed. 6. But I see a review for lyric opera listed under "reviews>theatre", (grievance number three is that this review for Lyric Opera is listed under theatre instead of opera.) so I click on the "more" button, thinking there might be more opera reviews. No again. 7.I hit the back button and return to the performances page. 8. Now I click on "Lyric Opera" article, thinking maybe if Kosman wrote it, I can click on his name and more articles by him will appear. Because in most other news publications (WSJ, NYT, Merc, heck, even the Examiner), if I click on an author's name, that is what happens.

I arrive at an opera review that is indeed written by Kosman, but is not "Das Rheingold". 8. I click on his name, expecting to find more reviews written by him. I get his email address instead. (grievance number four: instead of directing me to his email address, if I click on an author's name, I would like to see a list of more articles written by that person. ) At this point, I'm tempted to email him and ask him why the S.F. Chron makes it ridiculously impossible for those of us with very short attention spans to find his reviews, but decide that this wouldn't be a productive email, since he didn't design the page. Besides which, I'm sure he'd just ignore me.

9. So now I hit the back button again and I'm back to the performances page. Several clicks later, I give up and go to Google to do the search, since I know that it will correct my spelling errors and still understand what I want.

So about 12 clicks later, and via Google, I finally found it. If I had actually spelled "Das Rheingold" correctly, grievance number five would've been something about the irony of being able to find things on the SF Chron website better via Google than via their own search function, but since I was a spelling idot, I don't exactly have the right to voice that grievance.

It's true that I could've just done a search on "Joshua Kosman" on their website. But what if the Chron one day decided to hire another music critic? If I kept finding music reviews just by doing searches under "Kosman", I would never find music critic #2, were that to happen. Besides, I like the idea of "browsing" other similar articles that might appear via clicking on category tabs.

Now to compare/contrast, I searched for a random opera review by Anthony Tommasini on the NYT website. The NYT is like the inverse of the Chron, because I read almost everything (or at least skim the headlines) but the arts section. However, if I wanted to, I can go directly from the front page to the music section, by clicking on "music" under "Arts" in the left-hand column. Once I get to the music section, I can often find what I want. I wish classical music got its own category, but classical music reviews were 35 out of the 68 reviews on the music page tonight, which isn't bad representation.

Just two clicks later, I arrived at this review for “Il Matrimonio Segreto”.

Notwithstanding the downsizing of Holland and NYT's annoying penchant (at times) for being modern music-phobic (or maybe this ended with Holland's tenure?), it's clear which publication wants readers to actually find classical music reviews.

I don't understand why a publication that has a reasonable classical music critic would go and hide his reviews in some cardboard box in the back corner of an attic and make it annoyingly difficult for us to find his reviews.

Performers becoming obsolete?

One of my classical music groups on Facebook is having a fascinating discussion on the future of classical music. Well, ok, both fascinating and frustrating, because we seem to keep going around in circles and extrapolating people's responses.

It started out with someone asking where classical music is headed, composition-wise. The OP (original poster) talked about the break down in conventions composition-wise in the twentieth century--structure, tonality, key signatures, etc. --and raised a somewhat contentious question--whether there are any more rules to "break" and room for innovation.

As you can imagine, this didn't go too far, since this isn't a terribly productive way to think about composing. As someone pointed out, if the point of a composition is to be reactionary, the result is likely to be uninteresting.

Then someone posed an interesting hypothetical. Suppose technology advances to the point of having computers or machines that are able to play instruments at a level exceeding human mastery. Composers could input their scores into a computer and produce the perfect orchestra sound to play their music.

Combine this with the recent trend of orchestras where people barely make living wages and more and more are getting cut due to budget difficulties.

Will this result in a time when performers become obsolete? Moreover, is a perfect performance engineered by computers preferable to one done by humans?

Only two people seem to take the extreme stance that a) this is an inevitable trend and some day, instrumentalists might not be needed, and b)if indeed, technology advances this far, then a computer-generated performance (assuming it can produce the levels of expression that we imbue in our performances) will be preferable to a live (human) performance.

Most of us find this--removing the human element out of music--unfathomable, but there are varying degrees of opinions from "Music is just sound waves. Some day, it will be possible to recreate the perfect musical experience via machine by punching in a few parameters--tempo, pitch, timbre, etc." to "No freaking way. Never."

I, for one, am on the "No freaking way" end of the spectrum. It's plausible that technology might develop to a point where a computer-generated orchestral sound sounds better than any live (human) orchestra, since one could program out any mistakes or squeaks, etc. However, even if one could program nuances and expression into this machine-generated music, I can't imagine preferring that over a live performance by live humans.

Music, if I were to reduce it down to a neat formula, is sound plus the expression. Expression can mean the feeling one puts into their music-making. It can mean the interaction between musicians, as in a quartet, or the interaction between conductor and instrumentalists. It can mean holding that rest fermata just a tad bit longer, if the musicians decide that the extra millisecond of a pause will make the room thick with tension. It is the way a musician interprets the music.

Without that human element, music would just be sound.

Some posters (accomplished musicians, I add!) thought that one day having computers do the instrumental mastery part for them would be a good thing (". . .eventually, performers won't be needed, if the same expressiveness can be achieved by fiddling with the parameters of a computer program. . . . It would free people from the annoying task of having to master instrumental technique").

Granted, this poster is in the minority, and tends towards extremes, but I find this notion of instrument mastery as an "annoying task" a bit puzzling and troubling. It sounds like for this person, learning and mastering his instrument (if such a thing is actually possible) provided zero added-value. I would hope that someone who spends endless hours mastering an instrument would find it rewarding at least sometimes.

Though if enough people felt that "mastering instrumental technique=bothersome task", then perhaps performers may some day become obsolete.

Though I seriously doubt it.