Earlier quoted context omitted.
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I was going to write a more serious rebuke, but I can't really do any better than yours
Go for it.
The Blue Collar Jobs of Philip Glass
41–50 of 106 posts
Re: The Blue Collar Jobs of Philip Glass
#42Could any spoiled software engineer today do this
Re: The Blue Collar Jobs of Philip Glass
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, you could move out to rural nowhere, where housing costs next to nothing. Find some part time job, and live your life. I'm from a place like that, and a bunch of my old classmates from HS have lived like that their entire adult lives working part time. They work 2-3-4 days a week. Of course, you'll be sacrificing lots of materialistic things, but that's a given.
If Philip Glass had had to live in "rural nowhere" in order to afford to make music, we would have never heard of Philip Glass. vatys isn't asking if you can make any living this way, because of course you can. The specific conditions that allowed Philip Glass to work part time jobs and still live in the same city as people like Steve Reich and institutions like The Kitchen don't exist anymore.
> If Philip Glass had had to live in "rural nowhere" in order to afford to make music, we would have never heard of Philip Glass.
Congratulations-- you're officially wrong on the internet!
Meet Harry Partch:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Partch
He roamed as a hobo for years during the Great Depression. The text for Barstow is graffiti that he saw scrawled on highway railings during that time. It's featured in most music history books that cover the 20th century. (Also, many of the instruments he invented are visual works of art, in addition to being musically beautiful.) And if you liked the recent HN article on just intonation, well... let's just say you're gonna love Harry Partch!
There's also Conlon Nancarrow, who got pissed at the U.S. harrassing him when he got back from fighting the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. He moved to Mexico City and hand-punched player piano rolls in seclusion, for decades.
Other composers and musicians made pilgrimages to his studio, just to hear what it sounds like when, say, a 12-voice canon has each voice moving at different tempo.[1]
Nancarrow received the MacArthur fellowship back in 1982. At one point there was a piano duo who taught themselves to play a selection of his pieces as a four-hands duet for one piano.
People who care about music will find interesting musicians, no matter where they live. This goes back at least to J.S. Bach, who reportedly walking hundreds of miles to listen to Buxtehude improvise at the organ.
1: and what are the proportions for the voices of that canon? You guessed it-- they're the ratios from a just intonation chromatic scale, which Nancarrow probably got from a book by Henry Cowell (New Musical Resources, IIRC).
Edit: typos
Re: The Blue Collar Jobs of Philip Glass
#44That's an inspiring story!
I was never really a fan of Glass' stuff (but always respected his talent). This gives me a reason to reconsider my stance.
I may still not like his music, but I can't help but admire him.
Re: The Blue Collar Jobs of Philip Glass
#45He is such a humble guy. When I was dating my wife about 12 years ago, he gave a piano concert for free in Battery Park. You could walk right up to him: no barriers, no bodyguards. How many musicians of his caliber would do that?
Re: The Blue Collar Jobs of Philip Glass
#46> Just imagine reading Siddhartha or The Glass Bead Game at a steel mill—but that’s Philip Glass for you.
I don't know what this means. I worked a lot of "blue collar jobs" in my time, and I'd often see people reading "serious books" on break. It's not uncommon. I read a lot of Hemingway because of recommendations I got from a dude I used to work with cleaning concrete truck drums with jackhammers.
Re: The Blue Collar Jobs of Philip Glass
#47I don’t get this piece. I don’t know who honest broker is but I’ll take it he’s a Philip glass (PG) fan. So I’ll start there. What is the difference between PG doing blue collar work and anyone else? Why is PG having to drive a taxi or work at a plant any different? The article seems to want to praise PG by, what I’m reading anyway, almost patronizing him. But there is an undertone that insults people who have to wor…
I agree. The tone of this article was grating to me. Most of my family is blue collar and is very well read. My uncle -- who worked at a grocery store his whole life -- made a habit of buying me books 10 years ahead of my reading level all through my childhood.
Re: The Blue Collar Jobs of Philip Glass
#48I don't know why people look down on trust-fund kids. Being born smart ,as this author clearly was- is just another innate advantage, like being born rich. It's that the latter is denigrated. High IQ, or music talent, or sports talent is just as unearned as having rich parents. Yet we're supposed to downplay or feel ashamed of the latter.
Because wealth, unlike those other things, is readily transferable by taxation to level the playing field. I don't necessarily agree it should be, but if we could sap intelligence or other skills from the gifted and spread them around to shore up deficient people, I bet there would be a faction of people supporting this as the moral thing to do: "why should talented musicians meet and mate and produce offspring who keep disproportionately high inherited talent they didn't earn?", they might say.
Re: The Blue Collar Jobs of Philip Glass
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
If Philip Glass had had to live in "rural nowhere" in order to afford to make music, we would have never heard of Philip Glass. vatys isn't asking if you can make any living this way, because of course you can. The specific conditions that allowed Philip Glass to work part time jobs and still live in the same city as people like Steve Reich and institutions like The Kitchen don't exist anymore.
> If Philip Glass had had to live in "rural nowhere" in order to afford to make music, we would have never heard of Philip Glass. Congratulations-- you're officially wrong on the internet! Meet Harry Partch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Partch He roamed as a hobo for years during the Great Depression. The text for Barstow is graffiti that he saw scrawled on highway railings during that time. It's featured in m…
Congratulations, you missed the point of the comment while also being unnecessarily condescending! Another internet point!
The commenter remarked "we would never have heard of Philip Glass." Who among the laity would have heard of Philip Glass and the people you listed? I expect that Venn diagram is really two circles.
Re: The Blue Collar Jobs of Philip Glass
#50Many of my cultural heroes were ignored by academia Ignored, or the jobs just weren't there? A department head once told me that she couldn't hire any new tenure-track faculty. Turnover at the school is so rare, and when a position does open up, there are literally hundreds of highly qualified applicants. It's been that way for decades, particularly in the humanities and arts. She noted that among the existing facult…
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