Literary Corner: The Brain is Much More Important

Max Ernst, Saint Cecilia (Invisible Piano), 1923, via WikiArt. 

Elton has an organ

by Donald J. Trump

I. I have broken more Elton John records

He seems to have a lot of records.
And I, by the way, I don’t
have a musical instrument. I don’t
have a guitar or an organ.
No organ. Elton has an organ.
And lots of other people helping.
No we’ve broken a lot of records.
We’ve broken virtually every record.

II, Because you know, look

I only need this space.
They need much more room.
For basketball, for hockey and all
of the sports, they need a lot of room.
We don’t need it. We have people
in that space. So we break all
of these records. Really we do it
without like, the musical instruments.

III. This is the only musical: the mouth

And hopefully the brain attached
to the mouth. Right? The brain,
more important than the mouth, is the
brain. The brain is much more important.

Happy New Year! 猴年大吉!

Hóu Nián dà jí! Lots of luck in the Monkey Year!

Chen Yi's 1997 Spring Dreams, because New Year is the Spring Festival, setting a Tang-dynasty poem by Meng Haoran (translation somewhat original):

春眠不覺曉，
處處聞啼鳥。
夜來風雨聲，
花落知多少。
Chūn mián bù jué xiǎo,
chùchù wén tíniǎo.
Yè lái fēngyǔ shēng,
Huā luò zhī duōshǎo.

Spring mornings you sleep in, without noticing dawn,
though everywhere you hear the cries of birds.
At night, it was the sound of wind and rain
blowing the blossoms to ground, who knows how many.

Winter music

Image by WhoCares7 at Deviant Art. If you embiggen you can see that the fences in the middleground are musical staff notation.

By pure and fairly extraordinary coincidence, I'm not the only one who has brought together Sarah Palin and late Beethoven: The pianist Jeremy Denk interviewed her in October 2008 on the subject of the piano sonata op. 106 ("Hammerklavier"). I'M NOT KIDDING (it's just possible that somebody else was kidding, though ;-)). Everybody needs to read it.

Not sure I want to commit myself to listening to the whole Hammerklavier in the middle of a blizzard; I found a video of Denk playing the last sonata, op. 111, instead, which should be just about perfect:

Produced by The Contemporary Classical Composers' Bullshit Generator:

The fact that tones tend to (at least in their unified state), tonally influence, even in the presence of a strong perception, is, you will agree, patently absurd. It has been said that those who premiere a device are unable to reject or layer dyads, at least not percussively, but I fundamentally disagree. I have found that extended systems, in combination with unaccompanied aesthetics enable me to fragmentarily perceive brand-new visions in a highly intra-transdisiplinary and extremely Expressionist way. The fact that developments tend to (at least in their microtonal state), semantically abandon, even in the presence of a strong piece, is, you will agree, patently absurd. My fanfare is the only one of its kind, due in part to the inclusion of highly-microtonal orchestration-oscillations, with a hint of so-called 'perception-sources'.