I just noticed on a blog I've referred to previously, "From beyond the Stave," a new post by Suzanne Cole in which she explains how she ended up so fascinated with exploring the revival of the music of Thomas Tallis in nineteenth-century England.
As Cole explains, she was a student at Melbourne University in the early 1980s, and, despite a strong gender bias within the Anglican tradition, became an accepted participant in its musical practices.
"Although I was actually enrolled in a science degree, I also took organ
lessons with Revd. Paul Harvie, an eccentric, infuriating, but
inspiring Anglo-Catholic priest of the very ‘highest’ kind. After a
couple of years, in the absence of suitable male candidates, Paul made
me his assistant organist at the parish of Christ Church, Brunswick, and began, somewhat grudgingly (he was not known for his enlightened
views on women), to initiate me into the mysteries of what he referred
to on recruiting flyers for choir boys as the ‘900 year tradition’.
There is much that could be criticised about Paul’s methods – I was
occasionally allowed to sing with the choir, but never to robe or
process, and was always referred to as an ‘honorary gentlemen’, and he
was famous for flying into a rage if foolish parents allowed their
child to make any noise in church. But his quixotic commitment to
maintaining the English Cathedral tradition in a parish church in a
working-class suburb of Melbourne was both inspiring and intriguing."
Cole gradually learned that the tradition that she had been taught to uphold in 1980s Australia owed more to early 19th-century England than to practices of centuries earlier. She tells the story in her new book, Thomas Tallis and His Music in Victorian England.
On the last leaf of Vonnegut's last book "Armageddon in Retrospect" (posthumous, just published by his son this year), I found a wonderful quote:
"Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him.
It was music.
I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization. (January, 1958)"
This quote touched me a little. Perhaps because I just taught Beethoven's 3rd yesterday. Perhaps because I spend most of my time goofing around like everybody else in Indiana. Regardless, I enjoyed it and I hope you do to.
I'm off for a weekend trip filled with musicological joy--which will hopefully inspire more interesting blogs next week.
I was recently requesting permission from various museums and music publishers for illustrations and musical examples that I am including in my forthcoming book Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections.
One of the questions I was asked brought me up short: size of the print run. I contacted the publisher of my book, Cambridge University Press. Answer: 600 copies, at least for the first printing.
My only previous monograph (in 1986), which was based on my dissertation, was published in an edition of 2000 copies (500 hardcover, 1500 paperback). It's still available for purchase. A book that I co-edited (in 1997) printed 1000 copies, sold out within perhaps four years, was (I believe) unavailable for a few years, but can now be read in electronic form by anybody who wishes to log on (no need for a subscription or password) at:
Does University of California Press get money every year from CDLib.org for renting them this book? How does CDLib cover its operating costs if it makes its wares available for free?
The gradual emergence of online publication surely explains why Cambridge University Press now thinks that 600 copies might be a safe bet for the initial print-run of my forthcoming book. A colleague pointed out to me that a number of recent musicological books have come out in hard and electronic form, either simultaneously or in very quick succession. Two examples: Elizabeth LeGuin's book on Boccherini (UCalifornia Press) and Michael Pisani's on how Native America has been evoked in Western music (parlor song, Dvorak's Ninth, film music, etc.--Yale University Press).
But, getting back to permissions: the exchange I remember most vividly occurred back in the mid-90s, when I was trying to talk a permissions-giver (i.e., a recent college grad at a desk) into lowering a permission fee for a few measures of music to include in an article in a scholarly journal. I pointed out that I was not going to earn anything for publishing the article.
"Then why did you write it?" the young employee asked--not in an unkind way, just truly puzzled.
It's a question I suppose we all think about at times: Why do we do research at all, and why sweat bullets trying to write it up effectively? Should we make the argument elaborate and nuanced (for the few who care about all the details and evidence)? Should we keep it streamlined (so as to hold the attention of the non-specialist)? What different kinds of readers are likely to be consulting the book or article?...
In this regard, I just noticed an interesting personal statement on From Beyond the Stave, the music-book blog (of publisher Boydell and Brewer) that I mentioned in a post about Elgar's incomplete Third Symphony and the supposed New Musicology. The post is by Martin Anderson, the publisher of Toccata Books (whose wares are now distributed by Boydell--something I hadn't realized). He's writing here as a publisher, not an author, but he gives a good sense of what drives him to make high-level writing available on (in the case of Toccata Books) important composers who are not generally considered first-rank.
===== "I started Toccata Press way back in 1981, basically because I got fed
up waiting for other publishers to bring out the books I wanted to
read: there was nothing published in English on Enescu, nothing on Franz Schmidt or Pfitzner or a host of other important composers." =====
What a startling way to phrase it!: Write the book or article (or, in Martin Anderson's case, publish the book) that you wish you could read on the subject.
Is that why we write (or should write) about music, musical life, etc.?
I suppose there are all kinds of reasons for writing seriously about music. But Martin Anderson's reason seems so simple and obvious that I wonder why it never occurred to me in quite this way before.
Would we musicologists find it stimulating (refreshing, challenging) to think more about what we ourselves find engaging and informative on the page?
Might this question help a musicologist decide what to explore next in his or her research . . . and how to write it up for the readers "out there," whether they hold our prose in their hands or click their way through it on their computer screen?
The Second Summer Session is in full swing here at IU and I'm back in the classroom. I'm teaching a section of the same music history survey I taught in the spring. The class is standard history fare: Death of Bach to "Death of Classical Music as We Know It"™ and entirely too fast.
That much is alright. I guess we are all used to the idea of cramming nearly three centuries into a 15-week semester. What I am not used to, however, is the summer schedule. Teaching the class is now even more of a short ride in a fast machine as our usual fifteen weeks are compressed into eight. Eek.
When one accounts for days lost to test taking, administrative matters, etc., those eight weeks really feel like seven. And seven weeks just doesn't feel like enough. Last week we taught: The New Eighteenth-Century Style, Comic Opera, Opera Reform, the Symphonies of Sammartini, Stamitz and Haydn, and also Haydn's string quartets and what audiences expected out of their chamber music back in the day.
I know that we'll get through it all. I think, with some luck and hard work, my students could walk away with a fairly good sense of what happened in the last 250+ years of music history. But I can't help feel that seven weeks of learning will make long-term retention of most of the details impossible.
This is only my first year contending with teaching "The Survey." It has felt a bit strange, partly because I have never been on the receiving end of such a class. My "survey" class in college was anything but survey. My professor taught the course in an unusual way. The class had less than ten students and He took advantage of our quasi-seminar size. Instead of pushing through the repertory at breakneck speed, we spent an awful lot of time with a few pieces.
We spent our first few sessions on Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto. That's it. We read articles by Jander and others on the (possible) Orfeo in the Andante Con Moto. We learned about audience expectations and why those first few measures of the first movement would have sounded rather unusual back then.
I really liked the concerto before I took the class. After those first few lectures, however, I was struck with a feeling of never having actually listened to the work before. The piece sounded different once I learned the context. (And so I ended up here in musicology.)
But for all the revelation we did miss a lot. Our prof told us that we would need to make up some work on our own if we intended to go on to graduate school. And make up work I did.
I don't know which is better. I'm sure that my eight-week survey this summer is something many of you out there have all had to teach in the past--which is why I titled this blog post "Music History Survey Survey." I've just rambled about my limited experience with survey teaching and taking, but how about you? I'm interested to hear some of the more unusual stories of survey teaching from our readers.
In response to a great comment by David Cavlovic, and as a way of (hopefully) lightening the atmosphere after my last post, here is my favorite Wagner-abridged. As David said, "Lorin Maazel has NOTHING on Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd for condensed Wagner!" Yes, we've all seen this before, but I don't think it ever grows old from repeated viewings.
A confession--I don't like opera. Sorry. I know it's great and all, but it's not for me. I like my drama more dramatic (like in plays, where I can suspend a little disbelief). I like my music a little less epic. Oh, I also really don't like vocal-vibrato. Maybe that's why.
But--a bevy of news stories I read this morning might get me more familiar with opera in the near future:
First, Charles Wuorinen, a composer everyone should know better but doesn't, has been commissioned by the New York Opera Company to premiere a work in 2013. The work, you ask?: none other than the famous short story and much more famous movie Brokeback Mountain. It's a pretty good story (the paper version) and Wourinen is a great composer. Perhaps that opera will be a wonderful coupling. I can only hope that this is the sort of thing that might bring a different kind of audience to the house. This opera is not just for the devoted queen, but rather for the millions that saw and enjoyed the movie.
Second, a behind the scenes movie was just released, Wonders are Many: The Making of Doctor Atomic. I said I dislike opera, but Nixon in China and Death of Klinghoffer are exceptions. In fact, I almost saw Doctor Atomic until tragic fate intervened. I have since then heard the work on the radio. And now I get to see the behind the scenes DVD. It looks to be a doc of serious import with substantial interviews. The NYTimes review quotes some very quotable material I want to lift for a paper: "The British-born American physicist Freeman Dyson, one of the film’s most articulate talking heads, explains that science and art express the same urge to 'take the watch apart to see how it works.'”
Third, Wagner. What Opera post would be complete with a mention of ol' Richard. I have a love-hate relationship with him. Lots of people love him. I hate him.
I have a hard time sitting through a 2 hour movie or concert. I really like things that come in hour long packages or less. Mahler symphonies and Music for 18 Musicians are the limit.
I'm therefore ashamed to only find out today that a version of The Ring exists which caters directly to my inadequate attention span. In 1987, Lorin Maazel premiered his "Ring without Words," a 75 minute long take on the monstrous thing. Some might be dismayed that "situations that unfold inexorably over an hour or more in the opera house just pop into view here," as "it is jolting to cruise from the arpeggiated proto-Minimalism of the 'Prelude to the Ride of the Valkyries' in less than half an hour." Less than half an hour? Thank you, Mr. Maazel.
What I've read of it is positive and so I'm on a mission to hear this version of Wagner I might actually enjoy. Plus, no vocal-vibrato. If more opera could do that, I might become a regular fan.
Kyle Gann, over at Post Classic, has emerged from the end-of-term chaos for his first post since last month. In the post, he discusses his writing a book on Cage's 4'33". He has so far enjoyed getting "hip-deep" in Cage knowledge, as Gann says:
"In my teens I became too overwhelmed by Cage's influence and had to finally get away from him. Now I've got a much stronger artistic backbone, and can pick and choose, criticize and admire, whatever I fancy. He wasn't a philosopher, and any musician who calls him that just doesn't know what philosophers are or what they do. But he was an innovative composer with an original personality and an incredibly elegant and memorable flair for words, which latter did a tremendous amount to promote his career."
This philosopher/composer divide is a bone of contention with many Cage scholars. Most music history surveys cast away Cage as a thinker and ignore what he actually did: as James Pritchett says in the introduction to his The Music of John Cage, Cage is remembered as a philosopher, not composer, despite his having written "hundreds of compositions that are published by a prominent music publishing house, have been recorded, and are performed regularly worldwide.” Or, as James Tenney wrote in his essay John Cage and the Theory of Harmony: “some of Cage’s critics (even friendly ones) seem to think that he is primarily a philosopher, rather than composer…I believe, in fact, that it is primarily because of his music—his very substantial credibility as a composer—that we are drawn into a consideration of his philosophical and theoretical ideas.”
But that's neither here nor there. Gann's post resonated with me not because I'm very much devoted to Cage, but because I can recognize in myself what he now acknowledges in retrospect: I am easily overwhelmed by other's influence. In my last few years of grad school, I have seriously considered half-a-dozen different lifelong devotions to various musicological topics. Often, periods of intense crushing followed inspired studies with inspirational thinkers.
The topics I've bounced to-and-from are closely related, but disparate enough to sometimes worry friends and mentors. An in-course-work graduate student is not expected to have a dissertation topic nailed down completely, but he is also not expected to radically change topic ideas from term to term.
What's a boy to do? I don't feel like waiting 30 years until I have enough artistic backbone" to better handle influence. I'm reminded of one of my favorite ballads:
The life of a young scholar is a strange one. Four years of college lead to another four-six year term. In this graduate school phase, one is expected to interact with and learn from the greatest minds around, in print and in person. One is also somewhat expected to develop an independent voice, outlook, way of thinking. And, like red wine, one is certain to get better with age, but one best be palatable by 28-30 years, or there's little hope of acquiring that important-first-post at some-school-somewhere.
I watched a documentary on the Amish Rumspringa last night. This rite of passage (literally "running around") is a period from age 16 onward in which an Amish youth is freed from the constrictive rules of his faith. For the first time, he might wear "english" (ie: non-Amish) clothing, go the mall, drink liquor, drive a car, not go to church, or smoke crack (no, really, watch the documentary).
The point of this period is to give one the chance to see what the other side is like. Then, one can choose to be Amish and whole-heartedly devote oneself to the traditional life without a doubt as to how things might have been different. Most youth eventually come back to the church, are baptized, and spend their life Amish. Some, however, do not. (particularly the crack smoking ones, I would think.)
Could young scholars need the same period of freedom? Maybe it should be expected that after finishing our coursework we will do everything non-academic for a year or two. No work past 5pm, no notes in the margins of books, not visits to libraries daily, spend more time outdoors than in, no making really bad music puns, and so on. Perhaps a year or two of running around will only strengthen our academic ties. Only after a year in the "normal world" might we more confidently confine ourselves to the ivory tower.
And, maybe, after this Rumspringa, a youngin' like myself might feel more comfortable sorting out individual ideas from those overwhelmed by influence. Or maybe I'm just a little sad that my summer ends next week and I'm back to teaching daily!---my month-long Rumspringa is almost at an end.
I’ve been asked by Jonathan and Phil to offer an occasional
blogpost this summer.
Here’s something that caught my eye at From Beyond the Stave, which is the blog run by Michael Richards of the academic
book publisher Boydell and Brewer. (The
word play in the blog's title is clearer if you use a long “a” when pronouncing
“stave”—which is the five-line thing that in America we call the “staff.”)
Hugh Wood is a noted composer and critic in England. On March 19, he objected strenuously in the pages of the Times
Literary Supplementto objections by American musicologist Byron Adams to
Anthony Payne’s much-heralded completion of the Elgar Third Symphony. Along the way, Wood also took a swipe at musicological work written in a spirit of cultural critique. (The immediate context, or perhaps pretext, was the recurring focus on the British Empire—e.g., provincial/patronizing attitudes toward the peoples of India—in various chapters of one of the books Wood was reviewing, Elgar and His World, edited by Adams.)
Objections to objections tend to stir up more objections. Of the three lettersthat followed, Richard Taruskin’s was predictably quotable,
accusing Wood—and perhaps English music critics more broadly—of “defensive
insularity, anti-intellectualism, know-it-all complacency, proud ignorance,
[and] blimpish spite.”
An Englishman (and noted authority on ancient Roman literature), Leofranc Holford-Strevens, wondered plausibly
how long the rage for this new symphony by, or we should perhaps say “by," Elgar will continue.
Oddly, I don’t recall that any of these objections, whether to Elgar or to the New
Musicology (if we must use that unfortunate term), have been mentioned in
musical blogs other than From Beyond the Stave or in
postings on any musicological e-list. Surely
there’s room for another round of objections to the objections to the . . .
.
I can say that I’ve listened to the
Elgar-Payne Third Symphony (at least two superb recordings
are available) and that I was taken with it, despite my initial doubts. Maybe Anthony Payne is a composer whose output I ought to get to know better. Or is he the Süssmayr of our age,
capable perhaps of producing pages that will endure—but only when he is working with
material left behind by, as T. S. Eliot said admiringly of Ezra Pound, un miglior fabbro (a greater craftsman)?
Don't let the title fool you. This is not a post about Zawinul or Shorter. This is actually about...the weather.
Things have been a bit dramatic here lately. Tornado sirens are daily. 5 inches of rain fell yesterday. My poor tomato plants haven't done too well in the winds. Severe thunderstorms come more often than meals--yesterday I think there were at least 4. The worst left me a bit shaken. Lightning struck so close it was visible from both the North and South windows of my apartment. The strikes were bright enough to hurt my eyes and ears. The thunder actually shook the living room. Not fun.
Power has been off and on over the last few days so I've spent more time reading things on paper than CRT. So--haven't responded to delightful comments on my last two offerings. But, thank you all for commenting. It's uplifting in the calamitous weather.
Nothing warms my heart more than the following scenario: After a good thirty minutes in the apartment complex basement, the tornado siren ceases its call. I trudge back up stairs, fearing how much damage has been done to either my roof or my basil. Once both are checked, precious electronics are plugged back in. Gmail is up within minutes and at the top of inbox: "[Dial "M" for Musicology] X has submitted a comment to..." At least while I'd been below afraid of going out the same way as the Wicked Witch of the East, someone somewhere read what I wrote, and said smarter things about it than I said in the first place. My plants might be dead, but I'm still here and the blog thrives.
This is a cheesy post. I'm sorry. But guest blogging here has made me happy thus
far. And I might as well say thanks in case my luck with missing
twisters runs out. Besides, it's hard to blog about music in weather like this. I don't really much listen to music on stormy days. Nothing ever written or performed by man holds up to a good thunderstorm. Putting on some music while the storm rages feels like cutting a 10-year single-malt with Sunny D.
Most people I've talked to have similar feelings. On a related note: I was challenged by my undergrads earlier this year to explain how Cage is music. They new I spend a lot of time studying Cage, seemed to like and respect, and (a few) were worried that I devoted myself to someone who didn't actually write music.
4'33" is a hard one to get non-believers to like or respect. I think I found a way through the impasse--before I asked my students if they think the noise around them could be "music," I asked how many have ever turned off the stereo in order to better listen to a thunderstorm. Or--had any lived in NYC and attempted to process the chaotic street noise as something sonorous. Most had. Once those things were admitted, it surprised me how many students were converted to thinking of Cage as a composer rather than charlatan or philosopher.
And, on a completey unrelated but hilarious note, I'll leave you with this (warning: French people swearing):
Computer music pioneer Max Matthews claims he is not a "musician." He had some training with some instruments, but considered himself an amateur. Not that that stopped him. He composed and created a great deal of respected music compositions and software.
On a visit to campus once he showed us his radio baton. The device consists of a flat table and a hand held stick. The device can track the three-dimensional movement of the baton relative to the table--a very early wii controller or sorts (but without nearly as fancy an accelerometer.)
The movements of the baton could control a midi device. In the demo he had for us, Matthews played through some of Beethoven's 5th. His movements along the x-plane regulated the tempo, the y-plane dynamics, and the z-plane elements of string timbre and attack.
It didn't sound that great. The radio baton hasn't really had that much of a legacy, besides the obligatory picture or paragraph in computer music histories. But the idea behind it is a very good one. Matthews told us that, as an untrained musician, he could not ever perform the music he so loved. When performing music, he explained, one always has to worry about "playing the right notes" and "playing then the right way."
The radio baton, he explained, freed a music lover to play music without having to worry about the technical details. It offered direct connection with the music, where crude swings of the baton could execute what might normally take years of practice or a stage filled with musicians. Matthews wanted that experience, that high.
Why bring this all up? On Youtube tonight (where all good grad students waste their summers) I came across a video made by, Lasse Gjertsen, a self-proclaimed amateur musician. In this video, Lasse taped himself playing different things on drums and piano. He then chopped up the recorded and footage and put together a "live performance" of him playing a complete song from these chopped up bits:
The most creative stuff sometimes comes from the least trained. I don't think that video is musically genius or groundbreaking, but it sure as hell is entertaining.
I've known plenty of musicians who worried that their training somehow squelched their creativity. There's a precept that listening to Western scales makes it impossible to think outside the equal-tempered-box, just as learning "how to play" the flute might make one adverse to doing something...i don't know...like this:
Of course you can do that and more without a conservatory education. But maybe it's easier without one. I remember in high school imaging what might happen if someone (somehow, somewhere) had a piano in their house but had never heard piano music or any Western music for that matter. What might they create? Sure, the piano is already tempered to a single scale, but besides that, blank-slate for my imaginary person.
(I was very bored in high school).
Christian Wolff didn't teach music at Dartmouth for many years. He taught Classics. He actually refused to teach music (or so I was told) on the premise that teaching people music only limits the possibilities of what they might create.
I have a very spotty music education. I'm not very good at any instruments. Yet, I fancy myself a creative composer. I sometimes wonder if my lack of education accounts for my creativity. Maybe it's just a way of explaining away my lack of training and proficiency. Not sure--I like how William Billings explained it best:
"Nature is the best Dictator, for all the hard dry studies Rules that ever was prescribed, will not enable any Person to form an Air any more than the bare Knowledge of the four and twenty Letters, and strict Grammatical Rules will qualify a Scholar for composing a Piece of Poetry...For my own Part, as I don't think myself confin'd to any Rules for Composition laid down by any that went before me...I think it is best for every Composer to be his own Carver."
In class last term, we discussed whether it is possible to listen to/play a work without engaging with it hermeneutically. Rather than argue either side and get all "smart" about it, it's time for an experiment!
Let's pretend that we are all at a concert. At a concert, one knows certain things about a piece of music before one hears it. One might read something in the program notes, or have heard other works by the composer before, and so on.
To represent this, pick a number #1-8. Be honest and click ONLY the number you picked. Do not look at the others.
Tell me about your aesthetic experience: What did that random fact do for you as you listened? Did you ignore it? Could you? Did it matter at all? Go ahead and look at some of the other numbers now and listen again. Any changes in your feelings towards the work?
My bet is that it was impossible to ignore the thing you saw (or other things you might have considered) and just enjoy the "present" work. It is impossible to live in the present. Our state of presence is constantly influenced by what came before and what we think lies ahead. Or, as St. Augustine confessed:
“I am about to repeat a psalm that I know. Before I begin, my attention encompasses the whole, but once I have begun, as much of it as becomes past while I speak is still stretched out in my memory. The span of my action is divided between my memory, which contains what I have repeated, and my expectation, which contains what I am about to repeat. Yet my attention is continually present with me, and through it what was future is carried over so that it becomes past.”
Abstraction is unobtainable. We are hermeneutic creatures and can never listen to something without analyzing, formalizing, hemeneuting it up. These thoughts are not flights from the moment, but rather indispensable components to it.
But enough about how I felt. How did the experiment work for you?
Over the last couple months I've been working on a set of songs. The texts are borrowed from various Bukowski poems. I'm a big Bukowski fan (here and here). I recently encountered a poem of his that threatens to stop my song writing:
several months ago I was sent some tapes by a musician who had put several of my poems to music. he professed much interest in my poesy. I played the tapes on the way to the track and back. very classical (and I am a classical music freak) but the overall tone of the work was I felt tinged with intellectual elitism---the pretentious soprano voices and the general presentation.
I was both abashed and honored that the composer had lent so much effort and musical learning to my work. at the same time I felt that the overall effect was anti-life, anti-me, anti-the- clarity of directly seeking joy, pain, anything reasonable or sufficient.
it was the same old con, the same old snobbism, the same old murderous kiss of death clothed in a creative act.
so I wrote the gentleman back, "you know, I have certain problems, one of them being with instruments. some instruments which I dislike are the piano, the violin and the soprano voice, especially the latter. the human voice besides being basically ugly also reminds me of the human race
and one of the last things I want to think of and one of the first things I want to get away from when I listen to classical music is the human race.
(Sorry to quote at length, but it was worth it. The poem is "How to get rid of the purists" and the rest of it can be found on p. 195 of Bone Palace Ballet.)
I don't ever intend to publish my songs, so I've never once considered seeking the Bukowski estate's permission to use the texts. Now, however, I feel that I'll never have Bukowski's spiritual blessing--I know that what I do would displease him. I can't pretend that my songs are different--that he might have really liked them.
Why does that matter? The concept of non-legal, non-required permission is a tricky thing in both composition and musicology. What does it mean to have the "blessing" of an estate or subject? What des it mean to not?
Back in college, my musicological mentor Steve Swayne was working on his book How Sondheim Found His Sound. He joked that the best thing is to have one's subject alive and have his or her permission when you start a book, but then have them die the day one's work is published. But Sondheim, who had given Steve's book his blessing, lived through the book's printing. And, to Steve's relief, he very much likes the book.
I recently watched I Like Killing Flies, the documentary on Kenny Shopsin. He is the chef and owner of downtown NYC diner. He's an eccentric foul-mouthed cook who often waxes philosophical and regularly throws people out of his restaurant for not following the rules. He disdains publicity and only allowed a documentary crew into his kitchen as he was losing the lease on his restaurant and considering closing or moving--he wanted the death throes of the old place memorialized. Because of his dislike of the press, not much was written or made about Shopsin's before the documentary. One major article appeared in the New Yorker in 2002, in which author Calvin Triller confesses:
Anytime there seemed to be a threat of my becoming entangled in a piece of unauthorized publicity about Shopsin’s, I have resorted to rank cowardice, spooked by the fear of a lifetime banishment that might not even carry the possibility of parole . . . Yes, I’ve managed to write about Shopsin’s from time to time, always observing the prohibition against mentioning its name or location. That is one reason I’ve never been offended by Kenny’s refusal to recognize a reporter’s God-given right to turn absolutely everything into copy. In a piece about Greenwich Village a few years ago, for instance, I asked a restaurant proprietor “who tends not to be cordial to people wearing suits” what the difference was between the Village and uptown, and he said, “I don’t know. I’ve never been uptown.” Kenny has never objected to any of the mentions. He has always thought of us as being in similar fields, and, as someone who has to be prepared every day to turn out any one of nine hundred dishes a customer might ask for, he has a deep understanding of waste not, want not.
This article from which this quote is pulled earned Kenny's approval. And so did Steve's book. And never will my songs.
I'm going to keep writing them, though. I like them. Isn't that enough? Sorry, Bukowski.
