The rise of the omnipresent conductor: Not good for classical music

Per this great New Yorker piece about a sad recent trend in the classical world, many modern conductors are spread too thin. Or rather than that passive voice, they're spreading themselves too thin.

The piece's focal point is Klaus Mäkelä, who not only currently runs the Concertgebouw but is tapped to help Chicago in 2027 — while (at least until he says he's leaving) staying in Amsterdam as well.

In my neck of the wood, there's a regional example:

Fabio Luisi is spread across three continents, maintaining roles at the Dallas Symphony, the Danish National Symphony, and the NHK Symphony, in Japan.

Per the piece, it's not quite as bad as its focal point conductor, but bad enough.

 And, while neither Dallas nor the NHK (dunno about the Danish National) are top-tier, they're both solidly enough in the second tier that they shouldn't be sharing a music director. A Luisi could do one or the other of the two, plus the Danish. And, even be principal guest conductor at a third, smaller orchestra if the ego or tightening corporate symphonic sponsorships demanded. But, that's it.

That said, there's more.

That is snarkily topped by this:

American orchestra subscribers have become resigned to a phony civic ritual: a foreign-accented maestro flies in a few times a season for two or three weeks, stays in a hotel or a furnished apartment, attends a flurry of donor dinners, and dons the appropriate cap when the local baseball team makes the playoffs.

Oof. When Jaap van Zweden was in Dallas, he seemed reasonably involved. But, it was the only major orchestra where he was the music director. 

Speaking of, the piece notes that he and the NY Phil have parted ways. For the Seoul Philharmonic and the French Radio Philharmonic, to style it in English? Wow, what a tumble.

Bottom line? It's like the reading of books. Ars longa, vita brevior. I have only so much time to read, or to listen.

Wiki's page on Luisi adds this, which fits perfectly with the New Yorker snark:

Outside of music, his hobbies include the production of his line of perfumes.

Oy.

That said, I posted this to Reddit's r/classicalmusic sub, and in comments to it, got some bits of pushback, though the upvote rate on the piece was high. And wrong. Yes, many big names in the past did two orchestras at once. None of them did three, that I am aware of.

One commenter agreed with me on Luisi. See here and here for more of my thoughts on him.

RIP Dan Dennett

I would normally, upon hearing the death of a figure like this, one more “pedestaled” than deserving, write up some sort of “takedown” obit. In the world of politics and public policy, at my Blogger site, I’ve done that regularly, not just for the easy targets like Henry Kissinger, but also the likes of John McCain, per my “obituaries” label there. Beyond the world of straight politics, I’ve done it for the likes of Christopher Hitchens.

And now, there’s Dan Dennett from the world of philosophy — and also, like Hitchens, from the world of Gnu Atheism. (And, yes, that’s how it’s spelled.) But, I really don’t have to do anything beyond color around the edges on this one.

That’s because the same person from whom I heard of Dennett’s passing, John Horgan, had updated a 2017 piece about him that fills in all the basics.

The biggie? Scientism is bad enough coming from a scientist; it’s far worse coming from a philosopher. (Sadly, Dennett’s not alone in that.)

On the issue of consciousness in general as illusion? To nuance Horgan, I think that “something like consciousness” exists below the surface, and is connected to something like Dennett’s subselves.

That said, I’ll go further than Horgan in one way and call Dennett a big old hypocrite. If no “Cartesian meaner” exist, then neither does a “Cartesian free willer.” Across Boston at MIT, Dennett’s peer Daniel Wegner got that one totally right. (But, per Wegner, I think “something like” free will exists in the same way as “something like” consciousness; Wegner also notes that “free will” is as much an affect, an emotional state or value judgment, as anything.)

Back to Horgan. First, he’s totally right in Dennett being wrong in claiming qualia don’t exist. The Samuel Johnson refutation suffices. Horgan rightly also notes that Dennett’s stance on this is a backdoor to David Chalmers’ p-zombies. Hard pass there, as I wait for Dennett to come back as a philosophically undead p-zombie.

Hard pass there, as I wait for Dennett to come back as a philosophically undead p-zombie.

The scientism? This really raised its head with “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.” First, no, the equivalent of “evolution by natural selection” is NOT some “universal acid.” Second, Darwin included sexual selection as part of his idea. What’s the analogy to that elsewhere? Beyond that, life in general is simply not algorithmic in the way Dennett claimed.

Of course, on things like that, Dennett’s hypocrisy again raised its head. In this case, he was a greedy reductionist that he liked to claim others were, but never him. (This is similar to his denial of being a compatibilist on free will.)

The biggest issue in his scientism? Per Horgan, the claim that the mind is like a computer. That was a tired old trope decades ago, and part of a series of generally wrong tropes on “the mind is like X” that started with the beginning of mechanization and industrialization in human society.

John then ties Dan’s scientism to his rejection of wonder. And, that gets its own quote:

Some people surely have an unhealthy attachment to mysteries, but Dennett has an unhealthy aversion to them, which compels him to stake out unsound positions. His belief that consciousness is an illusion is nuttier than the belief that God is real. Science has real enemies—some in positions of great power--but Dennett doesn’t do science any favors by shilling for it so aggressively.

Friend Massimo Pigliucci has dropped his own obituary thoughts. He is kinder than I, and far kinder than John, on Dennett’s relations to religion. Here’s the NYT obit that he says unduly savages Dennett there. Sorry, Massimo, he may have been the kindest of the “Four Horsemen” of Gnu Atheism, but he was one. (That said, I don’t know that, in his book on atheist preachers, he explicitly called them out for being the hypocrites there were. Having potentially been there, and having rejected their hypocritical road, I can state that with high conviction.)

On matters of will? Massimo and I are in the same ballpark, but I don’t think we’ll ever be at the same moment. I’ve encouraged him more than once to read Wegner; I don’t think he has. I don’t think Horgan has, either. I think Dennett was halfway in that ballpark, but not entirely. (Wegner’s “The Illusion of Conscious Will” talks about the illusion in a psychology of mind sense, not that of everyday sociology.)

On the Gnu Atheism, this obit also reminds me of his invention of the word “brights.” Dennett’s later claim that the religious could call themselves “supers” rang hollow.

Massimo does add one thing I’d forgotten all about, and that is Dennett’s hating on Steve Gould. Part of that was, per “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea,” that Dennett was an ardent ev psycher, which Massimo and I certainly are not. Part of it, IMO, with the recent death of sociobiology founder E.O. Wilson and his hating on Gould’s scientific and intellectual partner Richard Lewontin, was larger political issues. (At this point, I’ll interject that Dennett’s father worked for the OSS in World War II and most obits mention him being of “Old New England stock” or similar. )

But, let’s also end with Dennett’s good. I, too, got an introduction into non-formal logic, non-technical modern philosophy with “The Mind’s I,” a collection of essays edited by Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter of “Gödel, Escher, Bach” fame. It was about 25 percent their own material, but much other, such as Nagel’s “What Is It Like to be a Bat?”, multiple items by the inimitable Raymond Smullyan and more. (That said, read here for a decade-old double-barrelled takedown of both.)

So, for a Facebooker in Horgan’s feed who talks about how much he learned from Dennett? So did I. But I then moved on. And unleared a fair amount.

RIP, Dan.

A monotheistic holy days mash-up with blood on everybody's hands

Christians in the world outside of Orthodoxy (unless Zelensky got the Ukranian church to move Easter as well as Christmas) celebrated Easter March 29.

Muslims had started Ramadan before that. 

Then, came the solar eclipse April 8, which means nothing to the non-superstitious.

But, the sliver of crescent moon the day after meant Ramadan was done and it was time for Eid al-Fitr.

Up next? Passover, starting Monday, April 22.

And, to wrap? The Orthodox Easter (a majority of Palestinians are Orthodox, I think, but don't quote me) is May 5.

All three of these world religions have genocidal blood on their hands against each other.

Christians, even if Hitler wasn't one, actively participated individually in the Holocaust. Centuries before that, before the Protestant Reformation, both Catholic and Orthodox leaders promoted the blood libel that Jews needed Gentile blood for matzoh. And, Pope Urban II did nothing to condemn First Crusade genocide against Jews in the Rhineland. Let us also not forget, via de las Casas, debate over whether American Indians were pre-Christian or anti-Christian, and thus, how they could be treated. Or mistreated.

Muslims? In what's widely recognized as not "just" genocide, but a holocaust, the Ottoman Empire, where the sultan was, at least nominally, the spiritual leader of Sunni Muslims as well as secular head of the empire Beyond that, per Wiki's page on the causes of this, the Empire committed further massacres before World War I that arguably also rose to the level of genocide. (So did the secular Turkish state after the war.) Those earlier massacres under Sultan Abdul Hamid II, even if not entirely religious, had a religious element. So did the WWI genocide under Mehmed V, who also formally declared jihad after entering the war. On the other hand, these and other genocides weren't entirely religious, and it's hypocritical for Jewish historians like Benny Morris to go ax-grinding.

And, we're now there. Beyond the genocide now having some degree of religious undertone, let us not forget that the Tanakh / Christian Old Testament has Yahweh ordering a holocaust — not just a genocide, a holocaust — against Amalek. Doesn't matter if it's legend/myth. Orthodox Jews, and everybody in power in Zionist Israel's government, cites it. And, historically, the forced conversion of the Idumeans at least approaches genocide. (Given that, per Yonathan Adler, most Jews didn't start regular observance of dietary and ritual purity laws until Hasmonean times, I think these conversions, as well as those of the Itureans, were indeed forcible.) And, Jews can be racist like Christians or Muslims even to fellow believers. Look at the treatment of Beta Israel.

Let's go back to the other two "western monotheisms." In addition to the jizya, many Muslim empires, nations, powers, required both Jews and Christians to wear special, identifying clothing long before popes came up with Magen David for Jews in the Rome ghetto they had created. But, and possibly by direct influence, popes did do that and it spread from there.

That said, don't get smug, Gnu Atheists. 

Stalin has genocidal blood on his hands from the Holodomor. But, don't act so persecuted, Ukrainians. By death rate, it hit harder in the Kazakh SSR than in the Ukrainian SSR. That said, Gnus, don't pull out the old bullshit about "Stalin went to an Orthodox seminary." I'll kick you in your genocidal ass.

Mao has genocidal blood on his hands from The Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and in smaller degrees other Maoist-derived stupidities.

Yes, they're all genocides, at least in my book. A deliberate targeting of one's own people, or socioeconomic classes within one's own people, counts as genocide in my book just like racial or religious genocides. That makes the French Revolution one, too, does it not?

Oh, and Hitler wasn't really Christian, even if not "anti-religious" (other than against Judaism) in the way Stalin and Mao were. We'll just leave that there.

Further bye-bye thoughts on OpenSky, re climate change

Per a group statement, it self-imploded.

Having snarked on them a last time recently, I thought I would take one last look, to see what it did, or did not, write about the climate crisis, being a bunch of neoliberal types, overall.

I wasn't snarkily disappointed.

ML Clark says the US won't get the election it deserves, and can't find one line of electrons to write about third parties, let alone third parties of the left, let alone Democrats' connivance with Republicans in keeping third parties off the ballot.

Earlier, she rightly bashes COP28 for a cop-out. She wrongly fails to mention "carbon tax" or "carbon tariff" as part of the solution.

Adam Lee has a good piece about minimalism in possessions, but without mentioning directly its ties to the climate crisis. And, that's offset by his piece from last fall being a sucker about Biden on the picket line.

Back to Clark, the main writer on this.

She earlier talks about the fifth US climate assessment. Several missing items here. First, "adjustments" to agriculture are nowhere near enough. Regenerative ag and feed to cut methane belches aren't enough. Eating less meat — a LOT less beef, and a fair amount less pork — are the ticket.

Lee then writes about the "Green New Deal" without telling you it's the Dems' fake Green New Deal, not the original Green Party one.

Weirdly, per Pew data that Ryan Burge misread or whatever, all these folks miss the biggie. NONE of them tie secularism specifically to how seriously people view the climate crisis, or even that they see it as a crisis at all. I wrote about that earlier this year.

"You had one objective .... " and you failed.

Beyond not really anchoring the climate crisis to secularism, to the degree anybody offers solutions, they're not that much.

Top blogging, first quarter of 2024

These are the most-viewed posts of mine within the past three months. That doesn't mean all of them are from the last three months. I'll indicate where not.

No. 10? More oopses at r/Academic Biblical, with the worst I documented being some nutter about "666."

No. 9? A two-paragraph brief from way back in 2007. "Patriots, gurus, scoundrels, martyrs" was, I think, the second post here to draw vigorous protests from "Addle Allone." I have one suspicion who that person is, but am not sold on it.

No. 8? Yes, Morton Smith is indeed the forger of Secret Mark. And, a 2023 book won't convince me otherwise.

No. 7? Some counterfactual/alt history about Caesar and the Ides of March.

No. 6? Trending from 2020 because I posted it at Reddit's r/classicalmusic, my saying at that time that I would take a pass on Fabio Luisi helming the Dallas Symphony Orchestra.

No. 5? From last year, about fascism in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. (Since posting it, I have crossed swords on Twitter with the chief fascist nutter of the story, Corey Mahler. Unfortunately, I didn't screengrab and now I'm blocked. IIRC, it was him spouting false flag nuttery about the Crocus attack in Moscow.)

No. 4? I murdered Robert Sapolsky, figuratively speaking, over "Determined."

No. 3? From last fall, and getting new reading from posting at a biblical criticism group, obviously NOT the blocked-to-me r/academicbiblical, my piece on Josiah not being Josiah, proto-Deuteronomy and more.

No. 2? The second from 2007, "more proof the Buddha was no Buddha," and possibly the first piece of mine to draw that vigorous reaction from Addle Allone. Allone, maybe, but not alone in reacting to this. Oh, while we're there? Buddhism is still a religion.

No. 1? Andy Clark is all wet as a philosopher of consciousness.

When was the book of James written?

Some actually pretty good discussion here on its dating. The long comment by Moremon is good, though he appears to be plumping for at least the possibility of a relatively early date within a pseudepigraphal James by conflating Raymond Brown's dating schema and Dale Allison's.

Pytine's comment is also good, bringing Kloppenborg into the mix.

First? Yes, absolutely, it's pseudepigraphal. The absence of second-century church fathers quoting it, except a possible but not guaranteed reference by Irenaeus, plus even into the third, and a bit into the fourth, centuries, later fathers still raising an eyebrow about its authenticity, are markers.

Second? At the tail end of the first century, many New Testament scholars note that Paul went into eclipse. So, no author at that time would have good reason for trying to make "James" look Pauline. And, yes, despite the "show me your faith," etc., and early-Lutheran era Martin Luther's perplexment, it is Pauline in look.

But, get several years into the second century? Different story. Assuming a still relatively strong Ebionite movement before the Bar Kokhba revolt, with Paul surging back into prominence again, an author trying to make a "James" look Pauline would have incentive to write, just like an author trying to deal with church governance in a Jesus movement facing an ever-longer delay in the eschaton would have reason to write the Pastorals.

Liotorg raises the issue of, dating aside, whether James had more of an indirect oral dependence on the authentic Paulines, and the first set of pseudeipigraphs, Colossians and Ephesians, or whether there was even a literary dependence. He says it doesn't affect dating, but IMO, a written dependence would tend to push James' dating later, in that you need more time for more copies of an ancient manuscript to circulate more.

Per other commenters, Craig Evans and James Tabor are wrong in arguing for an early date. Of course, Tabor argues for a Jesus dynasty, which commenter Dramatic Ad ignores, which means he has motive to argue James wrote in the 50s.

 

I was going to snark again on OnlySky, but ...

Per a group statement, plus this, this, this and this ... it self-imploded.

As regular readers know, I snark semi-regularly on Reddit's AcademicBiblical subthread. I've done that here on occasion in the past for OnlySky, but not for their particular atheist takes on biblical criticism, or biblical issues in general, nearly as much as ...

Their conflation of Gnu Atheism with secular humanism and

Their proxy war warmongering on Ukraine. Multiple links on that below.

I had gone to the website, since I hadn't been in several months, to see the take on Israel-Gaza post Oct. 7, 2023, and instead, they're dead?

The first "this" is by cofounder Adam Lee. Confirming what I suspected, and refudiating Gnu Atheist claims that the rise (kind of stalled) of the "Nones" means a rise in atheism, with more refudiation here, the bucks weren't there to support it. (It's not just that full atheists aren't Nones. In one OnlySky piece from 2022, James Croft notes the withering and imploding of the Ethical Culture world, saying the St. Louis Ethical Society's 350 or so members are one-tenth of the whole of EC in the US.)

None of this stopped Lee again, earlier this year, from, at least by implication, conflating Nones and atheists. Nor, globally, did it stop Dale McGowan, in looking at China, from conflating secularism and atheism. There are tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, surely, of atheistic and quite religious Theravada Buddhists. Yes, Buddhism is a religion, and a pre-emptive shut-up to claims otherwise. Ditto for Daoists and a fair chunk of neo-Confucianists. The reality, contra McGowan, is that terms like the Dao or Way, or T'ien or Heaven, is that they are metaphysical concepts in traditional Chinese thought, even if not deities.

The second, meh-ish, is by Captain Cassidy. She is religiously illiterate, IMO, having conflated Calvinism and Lutheranism.

The third? Jonathan MS Pearce. "The Self-Besotted Philosopher," I called him, to pun on his own moniker. A deep-fried proxy war warmonger over Russia-Ukraine. (Indeed, per a piece there, deep-fried enough to actually go to Kherson.) And, per this piece, also an Islamophobe and a Jesus mythicist, or at least a "fellow traveler."

The fourth? M.L. Clark, which finally gets me to the intended snarking.

As far as Israel-Gaza, M.L. Clark seems to have written about it far more than anybody else, and in pieces that probably needed editing for size or broken into multiple parts. This one, her best overall since Oct. 7, nonetheless never comments on the issue of many Jews conflating anti-Zionism and antisemitism. And, while the Nakba is mentioned, details of it are not discussed, nor is pre-World War II British Palestine and other things.

Item No. 1, per Wiki's surprisingly generally very good page about the Nakba, MUST be established, and that is that it was started BEFORE any Arab League armies attacked Israel. Zionists, even if they don't directly say so, will hint, to the degree they admit that anything like a Nakba happened, that it was a response to being attacked.

Of course, about the same time late last fall, Clark used the issue of Israel-Gaza war crimes to attack Russia for war crimes while ignoring Ukrainian ones. She does mention Russian claims that Ukraine has committed war crimes but never steps beyond "Russian claims." That said, she appears to be at least a low-level proxy war warmonger, or did. And, as with the Nakba, there's no backstory. Of course not; that would undermine being a proxy war warmonger.

Elsewhere, she shows she's a one-trick pony. Talking about German state elections in Thuringia, she notes that the Alliance for Democracy failed to come out on top. Two-thirds of the way down, she finally mentions Russia-Ukraine war issues and their effect on domestic politics, but doesn't get into detail.

Clark may not be as much a warmonger as Pearce, but she is just as much a neoliberal. I suspect that goes for others.

As for comments on the group announcement page? Yeah, other people besides the above that I snarked on early on? Kind of not writing any more.

And, commenters call out Adam Lee (and by extension, other cofounders). MANY of them talk about the commenting system being crap and say they told Lee et al that from the start. Sounds like an arrogance problem on the part of the founders. Shock me. 

Also? One person calls them out for neoliberalism. Another snarks on the Democratic identification in another way. 

As I mentioned in the "conflation" link? Robert Price is an atheist, unless he believes in Cthulhu's existence. He also walks, talks and quacks like a racist. (H.P. Lovecraft himself was definitely one.) But, the point? While I say that you can't be a humanist, secular or otherwise, and be a racist, you certainly can be an atheist and racist. Or an atheist and other things. I've said it repeatedly and repeat it again, atheism is no guarantor of moral or intellectual superiority.

But, by conflating atheism and secular humanism, and even among non-racists, excluding conservatives or true leftists alike, they had a narrow focus.

Back to the Nones not being atheists. You also had a narrow target audience. Your expectations were probably too high in the start. As for a place like Skeptical Inquirer? It doesn't pitch secularism as its focus.

Related? It reaches out more beyond the USofA. OnlySky was pretty much a Merikkka-only project. Again, more non-Americans should have been recruited from the start.

So, you blew it!

Bye!