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Showing posts from April, 2016

Unpacking Deepak's Mess: The Solution

Note: This concludes my three-part essay critiquing Deepak Chopra's view of reality and consciousness. In this part, I attempt to articulate my personal views on the subject. “For we move – each – in two worlds: the inward of our own awareness, and an outward of participation in the history of our time and place. The scientist and the historian serve the latter: the world, that is to say, of things ‘out there,’ where people are interchangeable and language serves to communicate information and commands. Creative artists, on the other hand, are mankind’s wakeners to recollection: summoners of our outward mind to conscious contact with ourselves, not as participants in this or that morsel of history, but as spirit, in the consciousness of being.  Their task, therefore, is to communicate directly from one inward world to another, in such a way that an actual shock of experience will have been rendered: not a mere statement for the information or persuasion of the brain, but an effec

The Mozart Oboe Quartet and More

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Proof of purchase. Since my Wolfgang Rihm foray a couple of years ago, my classical music acquisitions have been sparse.  I feel my collection is fairly complete according to my tastes and will likely only add sporadically to it in the coming years.  I made one recent purchase, however, that shows how you can never really cease to fine-tune your music collection if you take such things genuinely. Before now I did not possess any oboe quartets in my collection of hundreds of classical CDs. The oboe competes with the clarinet as my favorite classical wind instrument.  I own a few excellent oboe concertos by various composers as diverse as Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Rihm.  The oboe shines in a few scattered compositions, such as Mozart’s brilliant Serenade for 12 wind instruments (1781).   George Fredric Handel also composed three wonderful sonatas for oboe (from around 1710) which I own. But the oboe quartet has gone unrepresented in my collection until now.  I suppos