Spotting beauty elsewhere....

Over at 2Blowhards, Michael has a neat post up about French actress Sophie Marceau, who happens to also be a Move Over Britney! Designate.

On a more substantive note, Michael also links a fascinating interview with author Blair Tindall, who has written a book about the inner "business" of the classical music world, and not in the "financial" sense of "business" (the title of her book is Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs and Classical Music). Well, after spending long hours as a kid reading about the lives of the great composers (in books like, appropriately enough, Harold Schonberg's The Lives of the Great Composers), I would certainly hope that today's classical music world involves a bit of sex and drugs. Today's musicians owe it to their forebears, don't they?

Anyway, from the brief interview -- and you'd better believe I'll read Tindall's book -- I liked this quote a lot:

Many in today’s society are introspective, and yes, some of them are musicians. People in diverse fields can be as intensely spiritual as the most accomplished artists. Musicians are human beings who experience life in unique ways just like everyone else; and fortunately, the ability to enjoy music is more universal than many realize.

That's something that I wish more classical music lovers would realize: the ability to enjoy music is more universal than many realize. There are ways of venerating music that don't involve putting it on some kind of pedestal and behaving in its presence the way we do if we're in a cathedral and the Bishop has just walked in to perform the sacraments.

I read the discussion thread in the comments to this blog post, in which Lynn Sislo is participating avidly, and I have to say that I really truly don't like the "reverent" approach to music -- any music, really, but especially classical music. It's been my experience all too often that the people who insist on propping up some kind of artificial requirement of decorum before one can even come to classical music's table and sup on its delights are, in a real way, implying that the music is something separate, something outside of us. The atmosphere in classical music tends to be one of rigidly enforced reverence, and all that does is create an atmosphere where real internalization of the music is, if not impossible, made pretty damned hard. And that's a shame.