Scott Stilson

Leave the gun, take the granola ✏️ 🎤 🎵

Just listened to: a recording of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Op. 36 (1878) by Antonio Pappano conducting Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia on Warner Classics (2007). Never before have I so enjoyed the back half of an any album, classical, jazz, or pop, whose front half I described to myself while listening as “trashy” and “unmusical.” To be fair to Pappano, I think my problems with the first half are Tchaikovsky’s fault, not Pappano’s, and the latter’s conducting rendered tolerable what under Manfred Honeck was a glowering anti-carnival ride through the unhappy recesses of Tchaikovsky’s heart.

Here’s hoping that somehow that blatty first movement is a grower, because—the other movements! Second: Typically pretty Tchaikovsky (my daughter said was “very nice”) lent operatic, Italianate gravitas by Pappano and his Roman band. Third: Five minutes of charming, sometimes Looney Tunes pizzicato that remains grounded by its serious interpretation. Finale: I laughed out loud euphorically at this vigorous street party.

In a concordant, resolute response to Damon Krukowski’s brief “Revisiting the Pyramid of Inequality that is Streaming Music,” I remind myself that if I want humanity to keep recording music that isn’t of mass appeal—and I do—then assuming I have the means, I must buy records from the recorders and not merely rent them from the tech fiefs.

The kids aren’t the same age as they were before ✏️ 🎤 🎵 (That one’s actually from James.)

I’d change my mind in a heartbeat ✏️ 🎤 🎵

Every day is a revolution. ✏️ 🎤 🎵

Just listened to: a bunch of recordings of Tchaikovsky’s familiar symphonic poem Romeo and Juliet (1870/1880) as my inaugural part of a co-listening project with Travis. Of those, I enjoyed all of the following:

• Bernstein conducts NYPO as if Tchaikovsky had written the piece as the score to a 1950s movie.
• Muti conducts Philharmonia and Fischer conducts Budapest as if the composer had written the piece as the score to a 21st-century movie (which is weird in Muti’s case because he made the record in 1977).
• Abbado conducts Berlin as if Tchaikovsky had written the piece as the score of real-life, magical fairy tale.
• Doráti conducts LSO as if Tchaikovsky had written the piece so that Rite-of-Spring-era Stravinsky could conduct it (or eat it for breakfast).
• Pappano conducts Santa Cecilia as if Tchaikovsky had written the piece as an opera.

Again, all are worth hearing, but I enjoy the Abbado third-best, the Doráti second-best—because it’s just so different and exciting and snarly—and the Pappano the mostest. Because let’s face it: Romeo and Juliet is squarely the sort of story out of which operas are born. The hi-fi recording helps here, too, of course.)

Just re-listened to: Calefax Reed Quintet’s recording (2012) of Bach’s Goldberg Variations (1741). The only Goldberg variations I need, although I do appreciate Jeffrey, Jonah, and Rube.

Just finished reading: A Failure of Nerve (1997) by Edwin Friedman, which Morgan recommended to me. It’s a partial application of Bowen family systems theory to family and institutional leadership. It was sometimes difficult to wrap my head around. But it seems like it might quietly change my life. I’m not going to summarize it, but I will jot down some of what I think I’m taking from it, the first chunk of which draws some connections with Martin Buber:

To get to I and Thou, you’ve first got to have an I. This is the “self-differentiation” Bowen and Friedman view as paramount. Otherwise, you’ll never get beyond I and It: using, pushing around, or simply passing by other people in your life.

One of the ways to do this, or perhaps better, one of the signs that you have done this, is that you manage your anxiety and reactivity by maintaining some emotional distance from your own thoughts and emotions and the thoughts and emotions of others. Not that you should be unsympathetic to...

It’s part of the routine, now, Éa. I haven’t missed a wibble wibble in a week!

— me

Just listened to: Teeth of Time (2025) by Joshua Burnside at the recommendation of my friend Josh (no relation). Arresting, sometimes brusque, close mic’d shiny-brogue Irish neo-folk to whose genre description we might occasionally add the affixes “glitch” or “-tronica.” Highly recommended.

One niggle: Would it be too much to ask Burnside to endow his songs with proper endings? I acknowledge that the title of the last track is “Nothing Completed” and that there’s a certain formal congruence between that idea and the fact that almost all the tracks here either fade into nothing quickly or come to a sheer, abrupt stop, but if he’s trying to tweak our aesthetic noses with this, he has in my case succeeded.

Just listened to: Arvo Pärt’s Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten (1978) as recorded just this year by the Estonian Festival Orchestra under Parvo Järvi. Other than the bell, this is almost certainly what I’d sound like if I had:

• one electric toothbrush sounding an A4,
• a commission to score a tragedy, and
• a few dozen of me, humming.

Seen from another angle, this is Adagio for Strings, redux, except in the form of a single-chord prolation canon and probably even better suited to accompany Platoon. That Pärt wrote this to grieve to death of a man he’d never met fascinates me.

Just watched: The Great Escaper (2023), written by William Ivory and directed by Oliver Parker. “Sweet without straying into sentimentality,” reads Rotten Tomatoes. “Moving relationship stories,” reads one of the movie’s genre tags on Letterboxd. They’re both right. But where’s blurb that reads: “Never has a cozy movie carried so much potential for human moral development”? A culture grows hale and virtuous if we all watch this film.

Now, none of its lessons are novel:

• Kindness goes a long way—but it often requires courage.
• War is hell.
• Lifelong commitment to another human is heaven.
• Enjoy life.
• Grieve life. (Do not stuff it.)

Yet the lessons came to me in an inspiring, beautiful way that made me cry tears of guilt and gratitude: Guilt for my lack of gratitude (and thus joy) in life, and gratitude for the guilt.

And of course, the other lesson is one about the craft of filmmaking: If you’re directing Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson (may she rest in pace), you’ll probably do just fine if you simply tell your cameraman to just point his camera in their direction and let the film roll.

Just listened to: a recording of Abrahamsen’s let me tell you (2008) by Barbara Hannigan and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under Andris Nelson (2016). And well, we got the second coming of Ophelia. But she’s definitely a ghost. If in her first coming she had sung like this to Hamlet, he’d never have spurned her—because he’d be in a trance. Spectral orchestral song cycling at its best, although to call these “songs” is to stretch any normal person’s definition.

Just listened to: Christmas Songs (2004) by The Eddie Higgins Trio. Straight-ahead Christmas piano trio jazz of the sort you get for free on a Roku music channel.

God’s love is so all-encompassing it’s four-dimensional.

Lately, I have grown slightly bothered by the aloneness of two of my favorite things to do: listening to recorded music and reading books (and poetry). In most cases, these pursuits involve me walking, standing, or sitting by myself taking in artifacts of work done by people I don’t know—often people who I couldn’t know this side of eternity because they’re dead. Of course, none of that entails listening to records and reading books solo can’t be good. Often, the artifacts are insightful or beautiful enough to move me toward thanksgiving to the Ultimate Creator, to engender joy or peace, to inspire good deeds, and even adjust the course of my life.

No, the bother comes from the non-sharing of these very benefits. I suppose addressing that bother is partly why I blog. Yet blogging is an indirect way to share. It’s not exactly interpersonal. And interpersonal is the way of Life.

So. Today I took two small steps toward making music appreciation and book reading interpersonal: (1) I called...

When Jesus says things like “to the extent that you did it for one of the least of these my brothers or sisters of Mine, you did it for Me” and “whoever receives one child like this in My name receives Me; and whoever receives Me does not receive Me, but Him who sent Me” and when John writes things like “the one who does not love his brother and sister whom he has seen cannot love God, whom he has not seen,” they are certainly using rhetorical devices to create moral instruction. But they might also be pointing to a metaphysical fact: If in God we live and move and exist, then loving people is literally loving God—and not just because we’re doing what He told us to (although very much that), but because other people are literally part of God (and some of us, at least, part of Christ).

Lord, Your command is eternal life (John 12:50).

Noel made a distinction I’d never thought to make before: extraverted is not the same outgoing. He defined the former as something like “given to gaining energy from social interaction” and the latter as something like “fully at ease making new friends, as if by reflexive desire rather than by effort.” This was to help me understand the difference between me, an extravert who isn’t outgoing, and him and Mary, who are extraverts and outgoing.

Now, the APA doesn’t make quite as clean a distinction. Nevertheless, I find the distinction illuminating.

The fact is, Noel and Mary are inspiringly friendly. They show enthusiastic, obviously sincere interest in other people, regardless of their initial familiarity, in the same way that I show enthusiastic interest in virtue, reflective conversation, expressiveness, and good music. I want to be like them.

I do usually find it energizing to interact with new people. But I just don’t seek out such interaction quite as liberally or reflexively. And...

Just watched When Harry Met Sally (1989), written by Nora Ephron and directed by Rob Reiner. With the exception of the old sub-subgenre of the elite screwball comedies and with very honorable mention to the equally old but not as screwy The Shop Around the Corner, romcom is not my genre. But this is the best of its late-20th-century breed, at least that I’ve seen. It’s a screenwriter’s triumph. Yet I am left wondering: Can a man and a woman be just close friends?

Carla: Sully, aren’t you going to the sleepover?
Sully: Yeah. Ha! I got sidetracked.

When love says do, you do
When love says go, you go
Damn your fears
And listen here:
When love says do, you do ✏️ 🎤 🎵

After this He then says to the disciples, “Let us go into Judaea again.” The disciples say, “Rabbi, the Judaeans were lately seeking to stone you, and you are going there again?” Jesus answered, “Are there not twelve hours in the day? If one walks by day, he will not stumble, because he sees the light of this cosmos, But if one walks by night, he stumbles, because the light is not in him” (John 11:7-10).

If love is calling, damn the fear of death. Full speed ahead. Do what is right.

I found your calling. ✏️ 🎤 🎵