Monthly Archives: March 2015

The questions ‘What is friendship?’ and ‘What is philosophy?’ are one and the same.  This blog is based on their fundamental identity and gives an identical answer to both:  philia and philosophia are not notions or concepts but the pan … Continue reading →

Listening to the sophisticated pianist Jeremy Denk, Oberlin class of ‘9o, play Bach’s keyboard concerto No. 5 the way he plays György Ligeti’s Piano Etudes, Book 1: “IV. Fanfares”, I was also reminded of Denk the witty librettist.  The Classical … Continue reading →

The mothers of certain pianists come from the Maenads who in their frenzy tore to pieces with their bare hands Orpheus, the greatest musician in Greek myth, and cast his head (still singing and whispering Eurydice’s name) and his instrument, … Continue reading →

The Greek songs that lament a major national or personal crisis are based on the standard pattern of a particular family romance. According to it, Greece is a domineering, cruel mother who torments and dismembers her children, paying no attention … Continue reading →

Greeks turned secretly melancholic in the mid-1970s, when they started singing about their existential crisis, some forty years before confronting it. A penetrating morning cold/αγιάζι engulfed Greek music in 1973, with a male chorus intoning on a cantus firmus: “Πάρε το … Continue reading →

I admire musicians like Paul Tortelier and Eric Heidsieck who perform the 2nd movement, Scherzo – Allegro molto, of Beethoven’s 3rd cello sonata, op. 69 (1808) without looking at each other, and they just complete or counter each other’s phrase. … Continue reading →

Because I am constantly listening, I always hear music, all kinds of music – verbal, instrumental, erotic, urban, natural, domestic.  I don’t know why I hear music all the time, perhaps because I’m not listening to things but listening for … Continue reading →