Musicuratum

 brief guide to the front page of this website

While a statement “About This Website” is available, here some words may help to orientate the visitor. — Sections on this page are marked with numerals in larger type. Several provide excerpts from and links to the website’s original texts. In the first section there is a link to the recent introduction to a compilation of all of them. Likewise in the second: the text with which the project commenced again, after its Amsterdam years, in Madrid towards the end of the summer of 2022. In the third is featured the most recent post. The fourth links to the general statement, while the posts, and also a few incidental or auxiliary texts are accessed via the pair of menu items in the fifth section. The sixth presents further excerpts of and links to previous posts, in descending order; at the end is a link to a page entitled “Worthwhile for Listening,” which assembles music and other sorts of recordings. Through sections seven and eight the sequence of texts continues. Section nine comprises links to the website’s bibliography and to a page of suggestions for further reading. With the tenth the presentation concludes, paired with links to a contact form and to the pages of acknowledgements and the colophon. In the eleventh and last section are menus entitled “Books” and “Documents.” Here are paths to all the texts published on this website, in different compilations, along with a set of excerpt-books stemming from my reading. Near the bottom is a subscription form. Completing the ensemble is a poem which bears thinking on. — Just above this notice, to the right of the links to this website’s pages on the main music platforms, there is a set of what might seem like proper names: each is a gateway to an alternative website format, worth exploring at one’s leisure.

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  • Four Dutch Paintings

    Of the ways to fail at the task of drawing disparate things together, amongst the better are trod by concepts which move from tangible realities to the immaterialities of the mind and back again, the concepts which are, in a strong sense of the term, amphibolies. While failing — or rather, in their failure they approach nearer to adequacy. On the one side, the abstract and intangible takes on a greater concreteness; on the other, the abstraction slumbrous within the concrete and tangible starts to awaken. How they do it? Not by hiding but by underscoring their own character as… [read more!]

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  • 2

    A Second Round Again and Against

    A neat decade after its inception, this musical project is starting up for a second round. Its long hiatus was unfortunate, but unavoidable. Several years ago I was overtaken by private demands and could thus no longer attend to it with the time and the care it had need of, were it to bloom into anything even… [read more!]

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  • Where Other Shores Are (4)

    Courage often is a modest temperament. Mainly it seems to want that people speak sparingly of it, neither often nor loosely; asking implicitly that if… [read more!]

  • Where Other Shores Are (3)

    Expression given to some thought one was pondering, may suggest to the more contemplative that one’s heart did abandon it. To send it out, as… [read more!]

  • Where Other Shores Are (2)

    Amongst the entrants a tumultuous year ushers in, standing to the side are those who cast at least an eye towards pasts into which their… [read more!]

  • Where Other Shores Are

    Ill-treated as the political lexicon has been, would any linguistic remedy clear away the problems that result or only serve to palliate them? A prescription… [read more!]

  • On the Track of Total Warfare (2)

    “Aggressive dwarves,” alas, do overshadow by sheer number their lack of stature individually. Today, as though they concerted a vain response to dissimulate theirs, cavorting… [read more!]

  • Occasioned by Two Exhibitions

    After a three-month run at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, an exhibition devoted to “Proust and the Fine Arts” is one to prolong in thought, fittingly, in… [read more!]

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  • Bedlam, Now and Then

    Conspiracies in particular, more than crime in general, arouse delights of despair especially in the society of the spectacle, results which seem to demonstrate, if by them anything is ever “shown,” that something may indeed at times come from nothing, contravening the ordinary rules of logic, as though a mental contagion turns the absence of indications of a conspiracy inside out and, directing attention towards “it” in obsessive misunderstanding, conjures forth from the void a conspiracy to indicate the absence of — a conspiracy. A perverse mode of whiling away the time, indulged in nearly as a hobby, albeit with… [read more!]

  • Interludi en altres aires (3) Immobility and Urbanity – Works by Antoni Tàpies

    To festoon a building’s surfaces, ornament has hardly any role, is given no place to invest within the brutalism of “Casa 1736,” completed by H Arquitectes in 2023. Simplicity and economy of means the firm opted for when conceiving it, precluded resort to decoration. Detailing bestowed upon the millwork, for example, has been put there to delight the attentive eye, not keep the inattentive busy, as decorative elements exist to do. Nor have the bespoke light-fixtures, another prominent item in this architectural ensemble, been designed that they might extrude themselves and steal the scene, beyond the proper role which their physiognomy does… [read more!]

  • Interludi en altres aires (2) Some Buildings – H Arquitectes: “Casa 1736” (2023)

    Afoot in a city as abundant in good buildings as is Barcelona, their aggregate could lessen an aficionado’s resolve to notice most any one in particular, and the stroll finds itself soon bereft of the charm which sustained it for any flâneur. But what doesn’t happen when unexpected! — turn the corner, and a marvellous edifice flashes into view, some work already known of vaguely or else just discovered, seemingly unauthored and anonymous. Catching sight of it, wonder is aroused, provoking the eyes and even ears of thought to train themselves on the corpus of architecture this one stems from… [read more!]

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  • Notes of Caution (Against the Indifference of Today)

    Things of which, words which one cannot speak without damage to them, these are better left in silence, usually: unheard they will remain intact. Or in their stead a silence can be inserted. Yet if, concern aroused, one speaks (against) them, by their recapitulation in discourse, far from being destroyed, they may emerge more potent than before. — Then the challenge is both ethical and practical: just think of the task it could impose.

    [read more!]

  • Themistocles on Andros

    Over against all the masses, messes, and missiles of today, persuasion does remain worthwhile to think about. Perhaps by commemorative thought, freely given, some of the possibilities of persuasive words can still be redeemed, even as oblivion threatens many things upon which one often did rely, in actuality and/or in hope. Both the powers and the limits of words that persuade ought to be demarcated more fully. In the storehouse of antiquity, there is an episode which might answer to this aim, or it could begin to. At least some insights, perhaps even a lesson, may spring forth from a…

    [read more!]

  • How to Undo Things with Words

    Bright the prospects are not for words; once taken in hand as weapons, beginnings may no longer pulse in them. As though human speech too is beaten, persuasion cast out of its proper temple. How the senseless murk of noise then encircles everything! — while, naturally enough, responses to this impotence of the persuasive do display the colour of desperate embitterment.

    [read more!]

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Musicuratum

Devoted to music and other topics.

❙ Publishing irregularly; with style and care.

Original texts copyright © Musicuratum 2012-2026. ❙

Marke how one string sweet husband to an other,
Strikes each in each by mutuall ordering;
Resembling sier, and child, and happy mother,
Who all in one, one pleasing note do sing:
    Whose speechlesse song being many, seeming one,
    Sings this to thee thou single wilt proue none.
Shakespeare, Sonnets, 8