Kissinger undermined Rogers at every opportunity because he was profoundly insecure. Kissinger would yell at anyone available (quite often Haldeman) for hours about slights, real and imaginary. The story of Kissinger’s time as National Security Adviser was a story of constant tussling with Rogers, and making sure Rogers was kept in the dark. Nixon initially […]
It’s an awful question to pose, to pick just one (or even several). I’m forcing myself to limit myself to five: The 2nd movement of the Ninth: a dialectic of nostalgia and dissolution, of wistfulness and nihilism. The 1st movement of the Ninth: an astonishing accomplishment both formally (everything is in the first two bars) […]
The first four Mahler symphonies are called Wunderhorn symphonies for good reason: they all draw inspiration from songs in the Des Knaben Wunderhorn collection, including quotations or rearrangements of song settings that Mahler had done. That correlates with the structure of the Wunderhorn symphonies, contrasted with his later work: more songlike, more scene-painting, more focus […]
Oliver Stone’s Nixon. It may be an eccentric choice. It may be the choice of someone who does not understand film at all. But it’s my favourite movie. Grand Shakespearean tragedy, operatic, intense, cinematic tour-de-force, encompassing the world like a Mahler symphony. And not that this matters anywhere near as much to me, but historically […]
Dexterity in playing a musical instrument is all about muscle memory, not looking at the fingerboard. After all, you’re meant to play the violin while reading a score. And the fingerboard is in a rather awkward position to be staring at all the time anyway. So, if there is no score around to be read, […]
Well, this will be an odd response. Clarinet Concerto (Nielsen). Which is a companion piece, to my mind, to Symphony No. 5 (Nielsen). Answered 2016-07-31 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/What-are-the-best-clarinet-concertos-ever/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
This has already been answered by Mark Blanchard in the negative, in: Mark Blanchard’s answer to Do any credible scholars consider the speech given at the end of the “Great Dictator” to be one of the best in history? I put The Great Dictator on Hulu last night, with high expectations: I’d known of the […]
For the same reason we don’t attribute the Atomic theory to Democritus (or Jain cosmology), but to John Dalton. Democritus came up with a theory that there are indivisible atoms of matter. Heraclitus that fire was the first principle of all things, and Thales that it was water. These philosophers were philosophising; what they were […]
Dimitra Triantafyllidou’s answer to What’s the most embarrassing thing you have done in your work life? I was in my first year of my PhD. It’s that time when you try sooooo hard to impress your supervisor. You are so eager to prove yourself. You are the first one to get into the lab and […]
Well, Anon, I was 39. Had had two and a half girlfriends, and had just been dumped by one of them after a six month relationship. I’d pretty much resigned myself that I was going to hit 40 without a partner, and that would be the end of it. People at my workplace heard too […]