I have a preposition for you

As rozk notes, when a news story describes "a woman who ... has accidentally fallen into a Picasso painting," italics added, the first thought ought to be of a secondary-world fantasy novel set in the land of Picasso's imagination, and not of falling against or through the painting and tearing a rip in it.

Well, prepositions are strange things. The most challenging part of learning German, and I expect of other languages, is finding that there's no one-to-one matchup of prepositions between the languages: despite clear dictionary meanings, there are places where you'd use a different preposition in German than you would in English.

Even in English, uses are not always standardized. Has it ever occurred to you that the phrase "underwater" doesn't actually mean under the water? The Chunnel goes under the water. What "underwater" actually means is in the water, while the phrase "in the water" means on the water, while the phrase "on the water" usually means next to the water.

Yet somehow we manage.

musical discoveries

In my current listening, I've just discovered a passage by Schubert - Schubert! - that sounds uncannily like Philip Glass. I couldn't be more astonished if I tried. The instrumentation is right too: strings and organ, with soft creepy voices. I think it's from Satyagraha or Koyaanisqatsi. Franz, you didn't tell me you were a minimalist.

Current musical reading is Music Downtown, a collection of Kyle Gann's Village Voice columns that came from the UC Press booksale. I don't like all the composers Gann praises (assuming I know their work at all, which I often don't) nor dislike all the ones he dismisses - I was sorry to see him lump Michael Torke as one of a list of composers writing for "little old ladies" (a rather Ivesian turn of phrase, no?) - but much of the time he is right on. I'm still burning enough at a lot of old serialist propaganda that I cheer robust three-point shots like this:

But while bad 17th-century music is merely dull and bad 19th-century music is tediously grandiose, the late 20th century's bad music was pervasively ugly, pretentious, and meaningless, yet backed up by a technical apparatus that justified it and even earned it prestigious awards. Twelve-tone technique - the South Sea Bubble of music history, to which hundreds and perhaps thousands of well-intended composers sacrificed their careers like lemmings, and all for nothing - brought music to the lowest point in the history of mankind. Twelve-tone music is now dead, everyone grudgingly admits, yet its pitch-set-manipulating habits survive in far-flung corners of our musical technique like residual viruses.