we’re all done being jay gatsby…

this is a message to myself 2 years ago freshly graduated and surrounded by workless graduates reinventing themselves as social media gurus, food bloggers, etc.

although i’m not as hardcore as to buy clothes before food but the main mantra is the same. the main conceit of wanting to be an artist or any kind of creative professional right now is the idea that you can create wealth through doing things that our parents and most normal working people would categorize under consumption. Its not like every new app or successful company you hear about has developed some way to try and exploit or commodify that? gee

this alone doesn’t devalue art or the value of creative work in general, its just a problem in the deep entrenchment of this idea in our gen that participating in these modes of consumption are the path to affluence and success and not just the result of it.

Broke, Hungry, But On Trend, by Gayatri Jayaraman

tldr: we’re all done being jay gatsby when we’re broke or broken hearted

Alfven, Hugo

Alfven’s elegy is a short pastoral string piece full of a particular kind of english chill written by a guy with a huge soul. It was written way after schoenberg, however its not a throwback nor neo-romanticism, this was definitely music of its own time.

Alfven Hugo, 1872-1960

Andriessen, Alfven

Henrich andriessen’s “agony au jardin”

andriessen reinvents the aesthetic of medieval chant through his own brand of modal and constantly shifting tonal language. pretty exquisite imo

 

About

As defeatism gradually finds its way into our attitude towards classical music, mystification upon mystification prevents any kind of understanding by the public and even its adherents about its place and its value in the world.

However, the problem with existing critical publications is that they are hopelessly esoteric. They either devolve and borrow the obtuse language of 20th century critical theory, or read like the doctoral dissertations of graduate students, desperately hoping to carve their niche in an over-published, over anaylized portion of the whole.

On the other hand, popular criticism no longer offers a view of this music that ever remotely resembles a human opinion. read any section of any paper devoted to classical music and at best you get historico-musical tidbits about beethoven love life, or stalin’s purges during shostakovich’s career, or you get an devoted analysis of a given soloist’s career..

The content of “serious” writers today whether they be academic or professional – self-consumed with the problems of their tiny niches whether it be opera, academic modernism, ethnic music studies as opposed to any modest attempt at representing anything beyond a pre-circumscribed discursive sphere.

Finally, existent writing usually treats a narrow and antiquated set of topics inherited from past epochs, disciplinary fields in academia, laughable attempts at convincing people that classical music is still relevant.

We think the scope of criticism is vast- that is, it covers all aspects of everyday life in music, all genres and forms of listening to music, the institutions that . We believe that insightful cultural commentary can be achieved with colloquial and everyday language.

Operajuice is an outlet for clear, funny, and relevant polemic about music and culture. We believe history, music, and and our personal experiences form an interrelated whole and and are therefore relevant to music criticism.