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Bob Dylan’s Desolation Row and Tangled Up In Blue – From Complexity to Simplicity
Michael Gray, in his superb book on Bob Dylan’s art, Song and Dance Man III, sees Dylan’s use of language in the 1970s developing towards a new simplicity, after the complexities that make up much of his 1960s output. This process began immediately after the infamous motorcycle crash in 1966, following his critically and commercially […]
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Blood On The Tracks – Dylan’s Best Album?
I know many fans consider Blood On The Tracks Bob Dylan’s best album. It’s certainly a contender. The latest poll of Dylan’s album, in the January 2007 issue of Mojo magazine, has Blood On The Tracks at number 3 in a countdown of the top 50 Dylan albums, after Blonde On Blonde (no.1) and Highway […]
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The Culture Club: This Month’s Theme
The theme for the next month on the Culture Club is ‘Lost Love’. The works we’ll be discussing at our next meeting are: Le Grand Meaulnes – Alain-Fournier Lycidas – John Milton In Memoriam – Alfred Lord Tennyson Blood On The Tracks – Bob Dylan Casablanca – Directed by Michael Curtiz I’ll be posting thoughts, […]
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Was William Blake Mad?
GK Chesterton put it like this: And now, after a due pause, someone will ask and we must answer a popular question which, like many popular questions, is really a somewhat deep and subtle one. To put the matter quite simply, as the popular instinct would put it, ‘Was William Blake mad?’ Alexander Gilchrist, Blake’s […]
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The Musical Structure of A Midsummer Night’s Dream
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is surely the most musical of Shakespeare’s plays. In its verse, its rhythm and even its structure, it is never far from musical forms of expression. One of history’s greatest Shakespearean interpreters and critics, Harley Granville Barker said of this piece, ‘it is less a play… than a musical symphony’, and […]
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Andras Schiff Plays and Discusses the Complete Beethoven Piano Sonatas – Free Downloads
It’s not too late to get the entire set of mp3s from the Guardian, featuring reknowned pianist Andras Schiff playing and discussing the complete Beethoven Piano Sonatas. They’re free to download, and you can subscribe to the podcast to receive them automatically as they get uploaded. It’s a rare chance to get a master musician’s […]
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The Argument Between Law and Love – A Common Theme
When we picked the works for this month’s Culture Club, we chose them based on the concept of the supernatural, and the idea of ‘moving between different worlds’. But I’ve discovered another common theme among the major works we’re discussing (Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Powell & Pressburger’s […]
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William Blake Invents Free Verse in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Alicia Oistriker, leading Blake authority and editor of the Penguin Complete Poems of William Blake, claims that The Argument (plate 2) of the Marriage of Heaven and Hell (see below) is the first example of free verse in English. THE ARGUMENT Rintrah roars & shakes his fires in the burden’d air; Hungry clouds swag on […]
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William Blake and the Tradition of Antinomianism
E.P. Thompson’s excellent book on William Blake, Witness Against The Beast, provides a brilliant analysis of the religious and political traditions which helped form Blake as an artist, and the source of ideas behind many of his poems and paintings. In it he outlines how Blake’s work can be seen as part of a strand […]
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The New Yorker Reviews Beethoven and Shostakovich Symphony Cycles
Here’s a great article on classical music: The New Yorker Reviews the Beethoven and Shostakovich symphony cycles at the Lincoln Centre. I was made aware of this excellent example of music criticism via a post by Charles Noble on the Daily Observations blog. Sample extract: Yet the two composers [ie Beethoven and Shostakovich] are not […]