Random Monday

Reflections from the past week.

• Gunther Schuller

  From a regional section of the New York Times, I discovered that Gunther Schuller actually did some conducting on Miles Davis’ landmark album

  Birth of the Cool

  , in addition to playing horn. Schuller recently adopted some of that recording’s material for a new jazz nonet.

• What is a tusch?

  In Anatomy of a Noise, the phenomena of the brass section tusch is described. In this instance it was for departing LA Phil conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen.

  This is an old tradition that Philip Farkas describes in one of his books, but in recent years I had never heard of it being done — until now. Apparently poor Esa-Pekka got a bit startled by the exuberance of it and needed a second to recover himself.

• New category labels

  One reason for the recent 3-column redesign of this blog was to make room for category labels. These are the links at right that provide a direct link to a specific topic of interest, outside of using the search engine or just browsing around.

New categories include teachers and union stuff.

• Clampdown on comments

  Several of the blogs I frequent have had to buckle down on the comments section of their blogs in the past month.

  While blogs have morphed into something much different than their original roots, users sometimes confuse the concept of a blog with that of a public forum or a discussion group or worse, a place to get hostile. Rather than debating opinions, they attack the voracity veracity of the blog owner or other commentors.

  I very much enjoy and encourage user comments. I also try to keep the terms here very transparent.

  Yet, to quote Douglas Adams, the author of the popular “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” series, “A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”