Posted on 11/12/2015 3:36:27 AM PST by CharlesOConnell
Dear Mr. Cavette, I saw you tell Virgil Thomson on your program of March 13, 1979, "You know, of course, that you are a third-rate composer".
Here is Mr. Thomson's Louisiana Suite: Acadian Songs and Dances (1948).
youtube.com/watch?v=THDLkcm54F4
I can't think what you might have meant by that remark, Mr. Cavett. I found the pieces lively, in some cases replete with pathos, and anything but third rate.
I wonder if you, Mr. Cavett, had ever composed anything of comparabable quality?
Perhaps Los Angeles Bishop Robert Barron can enlighten us as to what there is in human nature to account for such a thing?
Here is his Seven Lively Virtues/Seven Deadly Sins.
youtube.com/watch?v=ugWYGRSotYY
One explanation could be jealousy, which is simply wanting what another has. But, no, that doesn't seem to hit the mark.
Now, Envy is sorrow at another person's good.
I wonder if that fits, Mr. Cavett?
Here is the vice of envy from Bishop Barron's talk, isolated in podcasts, from sacra-pizza-man.org/fr-robert-barron-7-deadly-sins-7-lively-virtues-2-envy/
sacra-pizza-man.org/fr-robert-barron-7-deadly-sins-7-lively-virtues-2-envy/
I can't presume to know what you might have had in mind, Mr. Cavett--what were you thinking?--but your Creator, who will judge your soul on the last day, He knows.
That last day will last the full duration of the history of the world, so that each and every sentient being will witness all our actions, in the smallest detail, good and bad, and they will all know that the Creator is a Just Judge, that the judgment He makes are completely and absolutely fair.
Knowing Cavett he was probably being sarcastic and was quoting some snooty review of the fellow’s music. Cavett may have pushed the whole New York high brow act too hard but I remember him as being invariably polite and funny with his guests. He’d say something like this to get a laugh and to indicate his opinion was the opposite of the comment. In fact he wouldn’t have had Thomson on as a guest if he thought the guy was “third rate”.
I started to listen to the music and have bookmarked.
Mr. Cavett, do you find something incongruous to affect aristocratic bearing while you a public gossip-mongering boor?
For my part, I have no pretensions of wielding an aristocratic bearing.
The ONLY measure of first, second, or third rate composers (or practitioners of any “art”) is how financially successful they are at it.
If they are not selling their work (to the paying public, not to an organization that uses tax dollars to buy “art”), then their work has no value.
Have you been steaming about this for 36 years?
Sebastian Bach was a pretty good composer; he presented a portfolio of unique works to the Margrave of Brandenburg to try to secure a position with him; they sat in a drawer unplayed; he could only get a job at a church where he had to teach unruly boys. He was largely unknown.
Wolfgang Mozart died in debt, his wife had to try to make money off his manuscripts, his body was thrown in a mass grave. He’d had to scrabble for anything he got.
By your standard, they were anything but first rate.
At the time they weren’t.
But tastes change over time and their works have acquired value since then.
I judge art by the “sofa rule”. If I wouldn’t pay for it to hang over my sofa, then it has no value.
Financial success (through sales to private entities) is the ONLY thing even close to an objective tool we have to measure an artist’s talent.
However, the tool is not foolproof. One exception is that there is not a (c)rap artist today that is any better than fourth rate. Face it, a Turret’s sufferer can do the same thing if you just set his vocal tic’s to a beat
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