The World

From Saeed Kamali Dehghan's Aug. 2, 2010 Guardian article:

"In some of the most extreme comments by a senior regime figure since the 1979 revolution, [Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei said: 'Although music is halal, promoting and teaching it is not compatible with the highest values of the sacred regime of the Islamic Republic.'
Khamenei's comments came in response to a request for a ruling by a 21-year-old follower of his, who was thinking of starting music lessons, but wanted to know if they were acceptable according to Islam, the semi-official Fars news agency reported. 'It's better that our dear youth spend their valuable time in learning science and essential and useful skills and fill their time with sport and healthy recreations instead of music,' he said."

(Guardian)

Bird of Prey

Poet Philip Larkin:

Charlie Parker wrecked jazz by - or so they tell me - using the chromatic rather than the diatonic scale. The diatonic scale is what you use if you want to write a national anthem, or a love song, or a lullaby. The chromatic scale is what you use to give the effect of drinking a quinine martini and having an enema simultaneously.

- The Paris Reivew Interviews, Vol. II (Ed. Philip Gourevitch)

(I'm still making my leisurely way through the series. I'd still recommend it! Where else are you going to learn special tidbits like: Dorothy Parker subscribed to undertaker magazines?)

World's Greatest Ever

"I didn't imagine being this good...but I guess I am."

Chris Chike is the Guinness-Book-recognized #1 ranked Guitar Hero III player in the world.



(via CBS on youtube)

I Love Rock N' Roll

Wally George: "When will you write more songs?"
Elvis: "That's all a hoax. I can't even read music."
George: "What about your guitar?"
Elvis: "Can't play it -- use it as a brace."
George: "What do you think of rock 'n' roll?"
Elvis: "It's the greatest ever, mainly because it's all I can do."

"Off the Record," Los Angeles Times, November 2, 1957

(via howstuffworks)

Judge Me / Feel Free

“One can't judge Wagner's opera Lohengrin after a first hearing, and I certainly don't intend to hear it a second time.”

-Gioacchino Rossini

(via thinkexist)

I Won't Be Your Yoko Ono

Richard O'Regan wrote a review of one of the very first Fluxus concerts (1962). Here 'tis:

The opening work that night was 'Danger Music No. 2' by a New Yorker, Dick Higgins. Higgins entered and took a bow. He sat himself beside a bucket. His wife, Alison Knowles, appeared with a pair of scissors. She began to cut his hair. Higgins looked content. After 15 minutes, the audience grew restless. Paper airplanes circled from the back row. Conversation took over. 'I'm sure I don't know what it is all about or what it is supposed to mean,' commented one of Germany's well-known abstract painters. 'I tell you Higgins is performing a rare work,' said Emmett Williams, a part-time performer and composer of this Very New Music living in Germany. 'He could play a Chopin étude every night. But Higgins can't give another performance like this for six months, until his hair grows back.' 'But there is no music,' we protested naively. 'Is this parody or protest?' 'You have to understand,' said George Maciunas, the American promoter of the festival, 'that in new music the audible and the visible overlap. This is what is called action music.'

(O'Regan, Richard. 'There's Music-and-Eggs-in the Air!' in Stars and Stripes. Sunday 21 October 1962, pg 33.
via Higgie, Jennifer. The Artist's Joke: Documents of Contemporary Art. London: Whitechapel and the MIT Press. 2007.)

Baby Remember My Name

In 1800, Beethoven wrote his Sonata for Horn and Piano for that most famous of horn players, Giovanni Punto. You know who I'm talking about - Punto! No? Let's hear what the reviewers had to say about the first performance:

From an issue of the Ofener und Pester Theatertaschenbach we quote, "...Who is this Beethover [sic]? The history of German music is not acquainted with such a name. Punto of course is very well known."
p. 256 Thayer's Life of Beethoven Vol. 1, by Alexander Wheelock Thayer, revised and edited Elliot Forbes

Hapless critic, I bet you're glad your name wasn't published after all.