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Why, as much as I gripe about our finance department, dealing with them is infinitely better than dealing with their research university counterparts.
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Also, things.
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What Mark said.
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"If you think that one inanimate shark is as good as another, your understanding of the art market is, as they say, dead in the water."
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"After 40 years and 1,500 concerts, Joe Queenan is finally ready to say the unsayable: new classical music is absolute torture - and its fans have no reason to be so smug"
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"An identity has become a bit like a private club. Once you join up, you have to abide by the rules. But unlike the Groucho or the Garrick it's a private club you must join. "
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Having read through that Guardian piece on classical music and a few dozen posts on the thread responding to it, and as someone who has significant experience with classical music of the last 100 years (including performing some of it): Queenan is badly overstating his case.
Yes, there is a lot of recent classical music that is essentially unlistenable. There is also a huge volume of bad pop music out there. That doesn't mean that neither genre is worth listening to: there is plenty of good stuff out there. If the music speaks to you, keep listening. If it goes over your head, or falls short of your expectations, look for other composers.
From my own collection, here are some 20th century classical composers whose music I like: Copland, Holst, Vaughan Williams, Grainger, Milhaud, Gershwin, Britten, Shostakovich. Of these, Britten and Shostakovich come closest to a "pure" classical style; the rest are heavily influenced by folk or jazz music.
OTOH, one of the biggest mistakes in my CD collection is a Kronos Quartet recording called Black Angels. The title piece, by George Crumb, is unlistenable, and the album includes an even worse piece by Istvan Marta. Rounding out the album are a piece by Thomas Tallis (a Renaissance English composer--what's he doing here?) a piece by Charles Ives where the gimmick is that the performers are accompanying a recording of Ives singing a song he wrote about World War I, and a mediocre Bartok quartet. Both Tallis and Bartok wrote better pieces; I will admit that I just don't get Ives.
As for twelve-tone music, I don't like the genre for the same reason I don't like twelve-bar blues: the format is too formulaic. It's hard to write a twelve-tone piece that doesn't sound like the composer, trying to get all 48 versions of his row (the original sequence, its inversion, its retrograde, and its retrograde inversion, plus all transpositions thereof) into the piece, is playing mind games with the listener.