Did anyone have an opinion or comment about the review by Richard
Taruskin in the Sunday NY Times on the Music of Pound CD from Other
Minds?
Charles Amirkhanian
_________
Ezra Pound, Musical Crackpot
July 27, 2003
By RICHARD TARUSKIN
According to an old and highly unreliable story, Pablo
Picasso gave a few poems he had written to Gertrude Stein
for comment. In the middle of the night, he was roused
violently from sleep. It was Miss Stein, shaking him
furiously and shouting: "Pablo! Pablo! Get up and paint!"
There are times when - listening to "Ego Scriptor
Cantilenae: The Music of Ezra Pound," a comprehensive
sampling of the poet's little-known musical output - one
wants to shout: "Pound! Pound! Write a poem!" More often,
though, one listens quite fascinated. Much of it is
strangely compelling, if eccentric, stuff.
The career of no other artist, perhaps, so nakedly exposes
the fineness of the line dividing crackpot from genius.
Pound's crackpot theories of social, racial and economic
justice famously landed him in a mental hospital (the only
alternative to prison) after World War II. He loved playing
the fool, describing his aesthetic theories, the authentic
fruit of his genius, in a semiliterate patois familiar to
anyone who has read his letters or scanned the titles of
his essays (gathered, for example, in a volume called
"Guide to Kulchur"). And those theories drove him to
compose music despite a confessed inability - vouched for
by his fellow poets William Carlos Williams and W. B.
Yeats, among others - to carry a tune.
etc.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/27/arts/music/27TARU.html?ex=1060433524&ei=1&en=9437ab8c98d2acfd
for entire article
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